http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/us-looking-revolutionary-binary-code-system?source=NWWNLE_nlt_daily_pm_2011-06-10The US Department of Defense is in need of reverse engineering older applications that no longer have source code behind them. They only work on older, less secure OSs and therefore need to be reverse engineered / disassembled in an automated way, since there are too many apps to rebuild by hand.
A primary goal is to be able to programatically produce an intermediary representation language of pure binaries that then can be used to rebuild apps on a component-by-component level. Ironically then, if this succeeds and the apps that easily and automatically disassemble other apps into reusable intermediaries ever find their way into the public, perhaps having "open source" will become less relevant
It's interesting to imagine that someday, brilliant algorithms and super computers may be able to take binaries, break them down, and rebuild far more optimal source code than was developed by humans in the first place
