[wladimir]

Fighting any wars against ourselves seems silly. But the problem is that companies aren't that willing to share information, or it is only available for a large price and/or with restrictive NDAs. Also, finding out how things work is simply fun.

Say, I needed write a custom GPU driver for some device, either to improve performance for some specific application or to work outside the dependency or API constraints of the binary blob (like porting to another OS). Usually vendors provide no register level documentation about graphics hardware, so the only way to do this is by reverse engineering.

Another reason for reverse engineering can be to find backdoors and security vulnerabilities (like these guys did) or even for legal reasons to find whether some copyrighted (or GPLed) code was used.

No madness needed at all. Or maybe just a bit.