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I suspect the much more recent news article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28809559 may have encouraged the author to publish this... and he was looking for a bug to fix, after all.

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That lets you decompile and likely publish a patch, not publish the complete derived source.

Patch for what though? Is the ability to use a patch taken into account because a patch to clang on Linux and a patch to appleclang on Mac have very different interpretations

Binary patches exist; there are fairly reasonable arguments that distributing binary patches (in a format that does not significantly contain the original work, e.g. bsdiff) is at least fair use, or possibly not a copyright problem at all.

Could you make the argument (not here) that binary patches are not a reasonable way of distributing a patch for a program that is frequently updated?

Doesn't the Chrome updater use binary patches?

https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/softwar...

The patch, of course, is covered by a separate copyright.

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