Unless you are talking about metaphysics/teleology, the only difference is levels of description. What software does is what software does. The difference betw

Unless you are talking about metaphysics/teleology, the only difference is levels of description. What software does is what software does. The difference between a binary and source code is just level of description. A binary is obviously very hard to understand, but it is just instructions to the computer, and those instructions can be interpreted by following them logically according to the hardware documentation. This is true all the way down to the OS. Of course, you have to trust that the hardware does what it says it does... I guess you could always break out the oscilloscope...