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by rabbitfang48 3626 days ago
I know of no country (or other jurisdiction) where a legal "right to decompile" exists.
2 comments

Many countries allow reverse engineering, and you could infer a "right to decompile" from that in some cases, but as far as I know none of them place any requirement on the source to make it easy.

At most they legally protect someone who decides to run a disassembler or decompiler on a binary from prosecution or lawsuits (but only in as much as you don't use the result to violate copyright or other restrictions).

The EU has a very, very limited right to decompile for the sake of interoperability.

See Article 6 on http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...

And for personal modifications, and so on.

And "copying the decompiled source of the part of MS Word that reads .doc files" counts as covered, so, it's quite a lot.

Especially with websites, where you might want to interact with, or write addons interacting with, WASM threatens those rights.