Russia's state-owned defense company United Aircraft Corporation has announced that it will hand over 100 percent source code of the SU-57 fighter jet to the Indian Defense Ministry.

Apart from this, the Russian company has said that after getting the source code, India will have full rights over the SU-57 and it can make any kind of modification in the fighter jet as per its wish, integrate any kind of indigenous weapon and make it fully operational as per its wish.

Russia has also said that if India wants, it can also integrate weapons made in any third country in this fighter jet. Notably, France has almost refused to hand over the source code of the Rafale fighter aircraft to India. After which India is not able to integrate its indigenous missiles, such as Brahmos, in Rafale. That is why India has integrated Brahmos in the Russian origin fighter aircraft Su-30Mki. Whereas India wants to install indigenous weapons in the state-of-the-art aircraft Rafale, so that India's attacking capability increases tremendously. However, India is yet to decide on the offer.

The source code of fifth generation fighter jets is considered extremely sensitive. This is because, firstly, these are the most advanced fighter jets and more importantly, this opens the way for making sixth generation fighter jets. In fifth generation fighter jets, software is a much more central part of their capabilities. This is why the US F-35 has more than 10 million lines of software code and the Chinese J-20 and FC-31 are also estimated to have similar extremely difficult code.

Although the code of the Su-57 is considered slightly easier than these, it is still much more complex than the old American F-22. For this reason, if Russia is offering to hand over the complete software code of the fifth generation fighter jet, then this is an unprecedented event. This decision also shows how much Russia trusts India as a strategic partner.Dailyhunt