Ask HN: Which closed-source software would you most like to see the code for?

- US air traffic control software

- Software that drives the NYSE and NASDAQ exchanges

- SpaceX Dragon vehicle controller (primarily what calculates the boostback trajectory on the fly)

EDIT: Honorable mention: The Knight Capital codebase [1]

Disclaimer: Please lawd don't let this put my on a watch list.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-08-02/knight-sh...

Renoise, music production software.

I've found it to be exceptionally stable and responsive; changes propagate with live feedback right throughout the GUI.

I'd really like to see if its qualities are the result of great software design, or just brute force and hammering away at it until the bugs are gone. It strikes me it would be hard to achieve with the latter.

If the architecture is good, whether it is a textbook use of C++ with objects, inheritance and templates, or something more modest/bespoke.

Early versions of Google would be interesting to see (would be interesting to look at parts of a version of the engine that are still small enough to reason about).

The code that runs my dad's pacemaker.

Whether he (or I) would sleep at night after seeing it...

Dwarf fortress. Incredibly complicated simulation and procgen code written by a guy who admits to having very little engineering knowledge.

The firmware from the international version of the Samsung Galaxy S3 which has unexplainable access to storage devices and such while the phone is powered down. I wanna know what was really going on there...

Roller Coaster Tycoon, to this date it still amaze me that Chris Sawyer wrote almost the whole game using Assembly

All the video games blizzard makes specially Starcraft 2 and Overwatch. They just seem to not struggle in lag department as other games. And for the massive world World of Warcraft it keeps state amazingly compare to other mmorpg's. Plus the networking seems to be a step above most.

The engine behind Opera up until 2013: Presto. I understand why they moved to Blink, but I liked Presto so much better... The current Opera has the same memory issues Chrome does, and it is nowhere close to feature parity as the 2012 version.

An open source release would let the community help keep up development

XP. Would love if somebody continued development in open way!

Visual studio. I've heard that its design is beautiful and I think I'd learn a lot reading it.

Sublime text!! I use it all the time

The one that runs the NSA's servers policing the internet.

VMware Fusion userland & kexts to see how they intercept IOKit USB connections.

I would really be interested in seeing the source for IDA Pro. I would love to see how it interacts with each operating system.

Off topic but it's heartening to me that after 3 hours, this thread has no replies. To me, this could be because of two reasons -

1. People believe most of their favorite softwares are already open source OR 2. They don't think highly enough of closed source softwares to want to know their internals

Matlab of course.

Bayonetta or thr Ai code from F. E. A. R.

The firmware for the radio on my phone. Ideally I'd like it to be free software, not merely readable.

To me, this is the wrong question. I don't want software to be open source so I can read it. I want my software to be free (as in liberty), so I can decide how to use it, rather than it use me.