Avast RetDec tool made open source...

News from the blog: https://blog.avast.com/avast-open-sources-its-machine-code-decompiler

Re code: https://github.com/avast-tl/retdec

polonus

Great, thanks Avast…!! :slight_smile:

I find it somewhat strange with the marketing (almost hostile) push with ads to get free users to upgrade, that the would then give something like this away.

Hi DavidR,

I see that in a complete different light, excuse my French.

Don’t you see what a brilliant move by avast tech lab this is really? Speculation of course, on my part,
but think like the lines of this likely scenario…

See this in the light of the latest developments round the total banning from American
(or maybe later French) government computers of Kaspersky’s AV software etc.

No one does any talking anymore about the NSA’s agent’s stupidity of taking a work-laptop home
and have it accessed by Kaspersky’s regular av (and later those files were checked on by FSB folk accordingly)?

Then NSA lashed out through Kaspersky against Russian sp**ks.
The action served two goals a protectionistic and political one.

It is the American mentality of “the winner takes it all”.

Come wind or high water, supported either with just or false arguments, you always have to win,
else you will stand out like a miserable looser.
And they always need a bogeyman to blame it all on, when something goes wrong.
In this case again it was the “Ruzzians”, so do not afford these forces any playground against you.

If Kaspersky had done the same brilliant move but earlier, they certainly were in less of a predicament as they are in now, experiencing their “Shmita” days. They could have blamed an “open source scan” of sorts or open software for it.
Now it was inside their labs and through their labs and out of their labs.

Did you ever hear of the days of “Attainment” laws in the USA of the fifties anti-commie days. Such days could return as the going gets narrow there nowadays. Good avast is already fully stationed and positioned there.

polonus

@ Damien,
You were 5 minutes late with this post. :slight_smile:
https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=66267.msg1435515#msg1435515

Sorry I don’t see it like that at all, by releasing this so that all can use and develop it as they see fit. What are they to do with that development, do they altruistically push that back or just use it for there own means.

As you can see I’m a trusting sort (NOT), when you spend seven years developing this surely you deserve the reward for all this time/effort/cost you just give it away. Whilst at the same time pushing out ads (hostile, borderline misleading, in your face), that infuriate your users, you need only browse the forums to see this.

Realize what’s been made open source is only for the 32 bit OS. :slight_smile:

Well there are 32bit programs that are capable of running on 63bit OSes. If you have the 32bit source, that could still give a lot of information, who is to say that can’t subsequently be used or at the very least shorten the development to a 64bit.

If it were truly of limited worth what would the point be in making this big show about it.