Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-interview-edinburgh--6c26d2-All the operating systems requ/en

All the operating systems required exactly such a betrayal before you could get a copy. And that was in order to get an executable binary copy. You could not have the source code at all. The executable binary copy is just a series of numbers, which even a programmer has trouble making any sense out of it. The source code looks sort of like mathematics, and if you have learned how to program you could read that. But that intelligible form you could not even get after you signed the betrayal. All you would get is the nonsensical numbers, which only the computer can understand.