[userbinator]

I think I might've actually analysed the code you're describing.

We even made a few tweaks to the code so that you couldn't just reverse it back into JS

This is why a lot of us keep our tools private... an old tradition of the cracking scene going back decades to the 80s. Think of things like IDA/Hexrays and Ghidra, then realise the most prolific crackers had similar private tools they had written many years before those appeared.

[tonyedgecombe]

>This is why a lot of us keep our tools private

How ironic, that you want to open up other peoples code but keep your own hidden.

[spijdar]

Not really ironic or related. The privacy here is, well, keeping the tools entirely private -- no distribution or highly limited distribution, not obscuring their function.

Irony would be applying obfuscation or other DRM protection techniques to tools intended to de-obfuscate/reverse engineer which are then distributed/sold. This is fairly common in commercial reverse engineering solutions, although I don't think the irony of the cat and mouse game is lost on the authors in that case...

[bsza]

why not - after all, none of the open source licenses say that you must actually distribute the program, they only say that you should also include the source code if doing so.

[laumars]

Different motives. Think of it like encryption: when someone finds a weakness in a cypher people will generally move onto a new cypher that’s harder to crack. The difference here is the purpose of writing those tools isn’t to improve security, it’s to break code open. So keeping these tools hidden keeps them effective.

[stjohnswarts]

The world is a complex place. It's not just open source vs closed source.

[richardfey]

But once better tools have been published, why not show what you did?