Important information about third-party and proprietary software: The previous procedures are a technical necessity because in proprietary closed-source software, the private symbols needed to debug applications are intellectual property restricted by the vendors. If these private symbols were publicly disclosed, the software could be reverse engineered. McAfee does not own or have access to these proprietary symbols or source code.


Glossary:

Companies such as Red Hat are open source, and release their source code and private symbols. Other companies, such as Microsoft and McAfee, are closed source and release public symbols at the most. Closed-source code and private symbols exist to protect a vendor’s intellectual property from being publicly available, and allow software sales to remain a part of their income portfolio.

Microsoft code is almost always closed source. Microsoft sometimes releases public symbols so that third-party vendors can view all Microsoft function names that are invoked when debugging their third-party software. But, function names are all that third-party vendors can determine about Microsoft code. Microsoft must use its closed-source code and private symbols to determine why its code behaved in the manner it did. This fact is a limitation in the world of closed-source software interoperability.