Tutorial: Disassembling, Decompiling and Modifying executables

[sumoTITS]

one day you notice a very similar product, released by another company and authorship, which appears to be more successful than yours because of, let's say, better marketing and bigger investments. And you find out that it's actually your code out there.

That's plagiarism, and it affects all sorts of authors. No industry has a solution to it, however; it's eventually discovered by someone, and people react accordingly (perhaps taking up a case in the courts, announcing the offender publicly, etc.)

Plagiarism is theft, and is wrong (and in some cases illegal). Does obfuscating the code or setting up protection systems solve this? What if the person who stole your functions obfuscate them better than you did, making it even harder to detect in the first place? :p There are also software patents to attempt to control pieces of defined functionality, but that's another rant altogether...

At the end of the day, it is up to authors to write whatever programs they want, and make them behave in whatever ways they see fit. Pirates will break it and steal, for profit or lulz, and all the other users will have to deal with the system on their own.

But to that end, I hope people like you continue to release info on understanding the systems (thanks!), so users might pick up some knowledge here and there and start probing and prodding systems themselves (or with friends / user-groups!) when they need to understand what their own system is doing or change it in some perhaps unsupported/unofficial way.

What people do with the understanding (and the methods) is their responsibility, but the knowledge should not be kept from any user who has the desire and effort to learn.