A few years ago, I had an opportunity to work on an interesting project--I was contacted by a business owner who was left with an unusable executable, locked by a disgraceful developer who took the money and disappeared. Having no source code, the only option was to patch the executable in order to change the execution flow and bypass the lock.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. It happens quite often that an old tool, which has been around for years (if not decades), needs to be slightly changed and then... well, then there are at least two options:
- The source code has been lost and there is no way to rebuild the executable after applying changes.
- The source code is there, but it appears to be so old that it cannot even be compiled with modern compilers without rewriting it almost from scratch. In this case, even if rewriting is not a big issue...