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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

> It's a funny situation, though: decompilation probably should cost a small fortune.

In the past, the same could have been said of compilers and even web server and mail server software.

> many [most?] fields where people routinely decompile stuff are very highly compensated.

If it's more freely available, and more people have experience with it, then the compensation might go down as the supply of people with this experience goes up. I'm not sure using salary as a justification of what a tool price should be makes a whole lot of sense. to me, it just sounds like an inefficient market because there's not enough competition (justification on the ground that it does much more than any competitor and thus can command a premium does though).

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Another way to think about it is that if any piece of professional software should cost a lot, a super-specialized piece of software that is hard to duplicate, is a near industry standard, and is used almost exclusively by people with high bill rates should be expensive. But again, my point is: IDA costs a lot less than its place in the market suggests it should.

I'm not arguing that a capable free alternative is a bad thing. I think there's an industry business case study in what Hex-Rays could have done to keep this from happening, though.

> But again, my point is: IDA costs a lot less than its place in the market suggests it should.

Sounds like every developer working on an open source stack.

Well, now the market is saying that such a tool should be open sourced and well, now it is.

I wouldn't say the market is doing that, government funded tool being released as FOSS is opposite to "the market".

Yeah, but it is the market - it's just not a perfect market; you know, the kind that can't exist.

No, "the market" means financial considerations created an opportunity that was fulfilled to generate profit. It could be that the economy gained via this FOSS release, and that was part of the consideration, but that would be structural interference by the government (which can be a good thing IMO) working in opposition to the market.

Market forces are often reined in, eg by human rights, those things aren't part of the market operating they're mitigations of the damaging effects. In this case it's an external force (gov action), not the market, that has created the availability of the product.

Hmm? Large customer of leading widget manufacturer decides to make its own widgets in-house instead and keep the build minus buy money (plus possibly getting a better widget). Totally normal market practice.

Large player in widget market has low marginal cost and deep pockets, sells widgets at marginal cost its competitors can't match. Also totally normal market practice.

Competitors exit market or are relegated to minor market share, leaving de facto sole survivor. Also totally normal market practice.

We could be talking about chrome just as easily as IDA pro here.

> I think there's an industry business case study in what Hex-Rays could have done to keep this from happening, though.

Is the fact that Hex-Rays is Russian one of the reasons why Ghidra exists? (Honest question.) If so, is there anything they could have done differently?

AFAIK the author is Russian but lives in Belgium

Hex-Rays is in Belgium.

In the past, the same could have been said of compilers and even web server and mail server software.

I'm not sure the exact same thing could have been said which to me seems like a testament to how complicated software pricing can be. Web servers never really sold†, platform vendors eventually figured out it's better for them for compilers to be free (non-platform vendors still sell compilers), etc.

† back in the 90s, Netscape used to pester web companies to make their Apache installs lie that they are Netscape web servers.

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