Editing Software cracking (section)

==History==
Software are inherently expensive to produce but cheap to duplicate and distribute. Therefore, software producers generally tried to implement some form of [[copy protection]] before releasing it to the market. In 1984, Laind Huntsman, the head of software development for Formaster, a software protection company, commented that "no protection system has remained uncracked by enterprising programmers for more than a few months".<ref name="Goode 2006">{{cite web| url = http://people.anu.edu.au/sigi/goode_jbe.pdf| title = What Motivates Software Crackers?| publisher = Sigi Goode and Sam Cruise, Australian National University, Journal of Business Ethics (2006)| access-date = April 30, 2022| archive-date = October 21, 2022| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20221021152956/https://people.anu.edu.au/sigi/goode_jbe.pdf| url-status = live}}</ref> In 2001, Dan S. Wallach, a professor from [[Rice University]], argued that "those determined to bypass copy-protection have always found ways to do so – and always will".<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Wallach |first=D.S. |date=October 2001 |title=Copy protection technology is doomed |url=https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/955098 |journal=Computer |volume=34 |issue=10 |pages=48–49 |doi=10.1109/2.955098 |access-date=March 10, 2023 |archive-date=January 21, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220121223205/http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/955098/ |url-status=live |url-access=subscription }}</ref>

Most of the early software crackers were computer hobbyists who often formed groups that competed against each other in the cracking and spreading of software. Breaking a new copy protection scheme as quickly as possible was often regarded as an opportunity to demonstrate one's technical superiority rather than a possibility of money-making. Software crackers usually did not benefit materially from their actions and their motivation was the challenge itself of removing the protection.<ref name="Goode 2006"/> Some low skilled hobbyists would take already cracked software and edit various unencrypted strings of text in it to change messages a game would tell a game player, often something considered vulgar. Uploading the altered copies on file sharing networks provided a source of laughs for adult users. The cracker groups of the 1980s started to advertise themselves and their skills by attaching animated screens known as [[crack intro]]s in the software programs they cracked and released.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Reunanen |first1=Markku |last2=Wasiak |first2=Patryk |last3=Botz |first3=Daniel |date=2015-03-26 |title=Crack Intros: Piracy, Creativity and Communication |url=https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3731/1345 |journal=International Journal of Communication |language=en |volume=9 |pages=20 |issn=1932-8036 |access-date=June 17, 2022 |archive-date=June 17, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220617173355/https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3731/1345 |url-status=live }}</ref>  Once the technical competition had expanded from the challenges of cracking to the challenges of creating visually stunning intros, the foundations for a new subculture known as [[demoscene]] were established. Demoscene started to separate itself from the illegal "warez scene" during the 1990s and is now regarded as a completely different subculture. Many software crackers have later grown into extremely capable software reverse engineers; the deep knowledge of assembly required in order to crack protections enables them to [[reverse engineering|reverse engineer]] [[device driver|drivers]] in order to port them from binary-only drivers for [[Microsoft Windows|Windows]] to drivers with source code for [[Linux]] and other [[Free software|free]] operating systems. Also because music and game intro was such an integral part of gaming the music format and graphics became very popular when hardware became affordable for the home user.

With the rise of the [[Internet]], software crackers developed secretive online organizations. In the latter half of the nineties, one of the most respected sources of information about "software protection reversing" was [[Fravia]]'s website.

In 2017, a group of software crackers started a project to preserve [[Apple II]] software by removing the [[copy protection]].<ref>{{cite news|last1=Pearson|first1=Jordan|title=Programmers Are Racing to Save Apple II Software Before It Goes Extinct|url=https://www.vice.com/en/article/programmers-are-racing-to-save-apple-ii-software-before-it-goes-extinct/|access-date=27 January 2018|publisher=Motherboard|date=24 July 2017|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170927222522/https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gv39mx/programmers-are-racing-to-save-apple-ii-software-before-it-goes-extinct|archive-date=27 September 2017}}</ref>