I am not talking about stealing code, or reusing someone's for profit. But I am assuming that if a program or plugin is distributed in a format where I can't readily view the source, that is a deliberate action on the part of the programmer. Is it acceptable to look anyway, for the purpose of learning? And if so, are there limitations to that freedom?
Is it acceptable to decompile someone else's code for the purpose of learning what they did, and how they did it?
source code;ethics
You indicated in one of your responses that you were more interested in knowing if the author would be upset by it... so if it were me, and you only did it for educational purposes and we met and you told me about it, then no. I would not be upset if you decompiled/reverse engineered my code. If the code in question was very kludgy/hackish and ugly, I might be a bit embarrassed, but I doubt I'd flip out (in fact, I might even be flattered that someone found my code so cool and interesting they just had to find out how it worked and went to such lengths to do so) - and hey, it might even be fun to talk about it!