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Comment by ebeip90 | Hacker News Reader

This is the dumbest thing they could do.

“Ah yes, all you hackers and crackers, please take this DRM’ed copy of IDA and please obey the licensing agreement and don’t bypass the DRM.”

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I'm not in this scene so take with a grain of salt, but I've heard that in many circles cracking your own copy of IDA was considered a rite of passage long before this particular change, and the company honestly may not care if their whole intent is to target the corporate market (a bit like how Adobe benefited greatly from Photoshop being widely pirated). Of course, the dynamic may also be changed by FOSS options becoming real competitors.

Oh really? I remember reading that each customer got a customised build so that if a customer did crack their version they could see who did it based on the cracked binary.

> and the company honestly may not care if their whole intent is to target the corporate market

If their goal is to target the corporate market, then they do care about individual hobbyists cracking their product - they'd be in favor of it.

Oh no, they were sore about this like you wouldn't believe. They'd rather refuse a legitimate customer than risk a leak. I can't even say they were entirely wrong: the sensitive nature of reverse engineering makes it hard to make sure you won't get ripped off. Still, they did take this personally.

They have a reputation of being one of the most aggressively anti-piracy companies that exists.

I've heard that IDA explicitly allows licensed users to decompile IDA itself. What's stopping someone from reverse engineering it transparently and making a competitor?

> What's stopping someone from reverse engineering it transparently and making a competitor?

Mostly that Ghidra is open source and no one would be willing to go through the hassle of reverse engineering IDA when Ghidra is just sitting right there...

Decompilation isn't exactly a rocket science: just about anyone capable of hacking on clang or gcc can write a simple decompiler. The entire point of IDA was that they've done that, and also a lot of tedious, boring work on providing support for lots and lots of different CPUs. There's just no secret sauce recipe for SREs to steal - even their FLIRT tech is documented on their site.

Probably patent law, unless it’s a black-box reverse engineering, in which case you can’t use a disassembler to peek at how it works

Patent law doesn't care about how you get to the same thing - independent invention does not work as a defense.

IANAL, I'm a random on HN, if you take this as legal advice I don't know what to tell you :D

No it doesn't, it also has a level of protection built in to stop decompiling itself

Because reverse engineered code is usually a mess, unmaintainable and takes a lot of effort to make even small improvements. Also, you run the risk of being accused of copyright infringement.

You mean decompiled code? Reverse engineered code is just code that someone wrote to match the existing functionality of something else.

Yeah, right. I mixed up things. Clean-room reverse engineering is, AFAIK, legal.

If I had to guess, they probably don't care about home usage of Hex-rays. Businesses have more to lose when using cracked versions of Hex-rays.

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