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Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

Very little. Everyone who was passing around pirated copies of IDA continued to do so before and after the release of Ghidra. More than anything I think binary.ninja started to eat their lunch because it was a far superior experience and up front reasonable pricing.

Hex-Rays did ultimately release IDA Home, but you have to sign up for an account to even find out what their hobbyist license costs.

I cannot underscore how much Hex Rays never wanted to have customers or sell products. Maybe this restructuring will fix that?

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I disagree with this for a non-direct sales reason: before, you learned IDA, cracked or not. If you learned to reverse software of any kind, you acquired IDA.

Now, more and more tutorials and introductions use Ghidra. Is it better than IDA? In some cases yes, in most not yet, but it’s easier to get.

If I were Hex-Rays, I’d be very concerned with a generational shift as people stop bothering to pirate IDA and those who learned on Ghidra enter the industry and don’t demand an IDA license.

This just came up in my current org a couple months ago and we cancelled our IDA licenses to start using Ghidra. Ghidra is ver capable in my opinion.

When I was in the US Gov there were plenty of IDA licenses floating around despitr the existence of Ghidra. The Gov thinking was basically "better to have it and not need it instead of need it and not have it". There must be a thousand licenses that never get used year after year. I suspect IDA is safe for a while for this reason alone, but of course could be wrong and don't have the numbers-just speculation.

It's also really quite easy to add at least basic support to Ghidra for extra targets. I for example got quite far writing a TMS7000 [0] target for Ghidra [1] to reverse engineer the firmware for a TI teletype... though I still haven't dumped the ROMs to actually get further with it.

[0] - http://www.bitsavers.org/components/ti/TMS7000/TMS7000_Famil...

[1] - https://github.com/benpye/tms7000

Exactly, I am at a job where we have decades of cumulative experience using IDA and even we are wondering if we should not cut ourselves free of Hex-Rays's lock in and begrudgingly learn Ghidra.

For a "new" professional/team, it makes zero sense to buy a IDA license nowadays.

> Hex-Rays did ultimately release IDA Home, but you have to sign up for an account to even find out what their hobbyist license costs.

And even then, IDA Home comes with some pretty serious limitations. It's not just a no-commercial-use version of IDA Pro; it's also a cut-down version with no decompiler, no batch mode, and which only disassembles code for one processor family (which you have to choose at the time of purchase, from a limited subset of what IDA Pro supports).

IDA Pro doesn't come with a decompiler either. For that you need to spend extra and pay for the hex-rays license on top of the price for the disassembler.

The total price kicks licensing costs well outside that of hobbyist use cases.

For IDA Home they do give you their cloud decompiler for 64-bit binaries: “The 64-bit PC, ARM and PPC come with a compatible cloud-based Decompiler currently in beta testing mode” https://hex-rays.com/products/idahome/

But, like you said, IDA Home is additionally limited to one architecture, which is a bit annoying.

They were, according to this, doing 20MM in 2020, which is surprisingly high for something like IDA. I think they mostly just don't want people like us as clients.

If you translate this article you’ll see that they didn’t just do 20 million in revenue, they made 18 million in profit with 18 employees, 11 of them being devs: https://archive.ph/Abxqp

> Hex-Rays did ultimately release IDA Home, but you have to sign up for an account to even find out what their hobbyist license costs.

It was all over their release announcement and Twitter, iirc. From their website: “For the price of $365 / year” https://hex-rays.com/products/idahome/

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