The primary goals of this community are:

1. To make assembler programming more approachable and easier
   
2. To share knowledge
   
3. To educate
   
4. To troubleshoot problems
   
5. To disseminate assembly language programming know-how
   

And although some superfically-minded participants surmise an ulterior motive (when they hear the word assembly), this community DOES NOT AIM TO:

• Hack
  
• Crack
  
• Reverse-engineer
  
• Or circumvent any copyright laws and/or conventions
  

The author of FASM wrote it to make assembly programming easier for himself and then shared it with us, including the highly readable and annotated sources; let's keep the same spirit in our posts.

- Ciper

When I was starting (1986) hacking had a different meaning:
to sit through the night(s) and code/debug/repeat.



Reverse-engineering is very interesting.
I see nothing wrong with it, if I do it not for sale, but for education.
Just to see how the code is made or protected.

Unfortunately nowadays hacking is perceived to be bad; e.g. if you expose and use a private method in a DLL that you have licensed fully, M$ come after you (happened to me).

Again unfortunately, reverse-engineering is explicitly disallowed in lots of EULAs; it's a pity because one learns so much by doing it.

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Very true.
But AFAIK most common people (or script kiddies) associate reverse engineering with "bypassing software protection" or "writing patches/keygens".

That's why it get frowned upon on a certain assembly-related forum