Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonatron | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how Hex-Rays IDA sales are doing since Ghidra was released. Edit: If anyone can read French accounts: https://consult.cbso.nbb.be/consult-enterprise/0873473914

View on HN

Biggest impact was reduction of the typical "find untrojaned chinese bootleg copy of IDA" step.

Not that it disappeared completely, but there's less of a need :)

Cracking IDA is a right of passage

Most Ghidra discussion I see online boils down to whining that it's not IDA Pro, so, probably not bad.

From my experience, the muscle memory is strong with ida. Once you’re used to it, it’s hard to switch. So I don’t expect that there was a dramatic plunge as soon as ghidra was released.

I have no inside knowledge but I expect the sales drop slowly as new users start with ghidra instead of ida.

I guess IDA is the Photoshop of software RE.

Spatial memory … the good reason no one likes interface changes.

What's annoying in IDA Pro price system is that for every OS you need a separate license. Every other tool - Binary Ninja, JEB, etc - has just a license for particular edition and add-ons but it is valid for every operating system.

Piracy-wise it's a good strategy though.

Most of leaked copies in recent years were specifically bought to be pirated (except Keen Lab one, rip), and as Windows binaries are the actually portable executables now because of ABI stability and Wine, they almost always buy the Windows version.

I've never seen a single leaked Linux IDA Pro and it's immensely useful to have IDA on a real OS without headaches caused by Wine.

I don't think anything changed commercially. In security companies, know hows, scripts, support, feature set, is all IDA, not Ghidra. Especially the feature set is not yet the same (IDA has more bells and whistles).

Personally, I've switched to Ghidra for most of the things, IDA only when Ghidra doesn't handle something. But then again, personally I never was an IDA customer, beacuse it's too expensive for hobbyist use (and IDA Free is too limited).

I think the effect on pirated debuggers might have been bigger. When I was young and dabbled in this space one fun part of the experience was finding a cracked version of Olly that didn't have custom trojans in it. I'm sure this tradition continued after I sort of dropped out, at least until Ghidra and WinDbg and low-threshold gdb-facades made it less relevant.

Cracked versions of OllyDbg? Wasn't OllyDbg always free?

Nah, it was shareware at first.

V1 is still shareware, but wasn't it always free to use? I mean, not that it matters in the long run, now I guess Olly was superseded by x64dbg anyway, but as a person who migrated from SoftICE to Olly, I've never had to find a cracked version for it. But the again, I was one of those "last men standing" when it came to migration, so I could migrate relatively late compared to others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com