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Back in 2013 or 2014 I was in school for my CS degree and was getting interested in binary analysis. This was pre-Ghidra's release obviously, so I looked aroun

Back in 2013 or 2014 I was in school for my CS degree and was getting interested in binary analysis. This was pre-Ghidra's release obviously, so I looked around for disassembler and came across IDA. I couldn't find a student version, so I actually emailed them asking about it. The answer I got was a prompt, but terse, "No, sorry.". I always wondered, how do you expect to gain mind-share if you won't even throw an undergrad a trial license? Regardless, it looks like Ghidra is eating IDA's lunch and at $365/year this doesn't seem like an adequate response.

matheusmoreira 7y ago
The adequate response is to open up their source code and let everyone else merge the good parts into Ghidra and Radare2. Doing anything else will doom them to irrelevance in the long run. Chances are home users are pirating it anyway. Every specialized field should have gold standard open source software like this. Companies could avoid paying hundreds of thousands per year in license fees if only they pooled their resources and hired programmers to implement common technology everyone could use.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Every specialized field should have gold standard open source software like this. It sounds like this field will have it soon with Ghidra.
lol768 7y ago
Seems to be a common story in this area. I remember asking the Hopper folks if they'd do even an academic discount and it was similarly a no. Their argument was that it was on par with some academic textbooks .. maybe in the USA, but I never bought a textbook throughout my 3 year CS degree! That's what the library and electronic resources were for. I concede it was more accessibly priced than e.g. IDA but it's definitely a shame HexRays and others aren't as willing to allow non-commercial educational use. I think they'd benefit in the long run, you'd definitely have some folks using the products they're familiar with commercially after a few years. Meanwhile for software development, you have companies like JetBrains and GitHub offering premium products completely free of price.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Hopper has (or used to have) student discounts…
  - XMPPwocky 7y ago
    From my email in 2015, > Thank you for your interest in Hopper. Yes, I usually offer a 20% discount to students. If you are still interested, please let me know, and I’ll prepare an invoice for you.

matheusmoreira 7y ago

The adequate response is to open up their source code and let everyone else merge the good parts into Ghidra and Radare2. Doing anything else will doom them to irrelevance in the long run. Chances are home users are pirating it anyway. Every specialized field should have gold standard open source software like this. Companies could avoid paying hundreds of thousands per year in license fees if only they pooled their resources and hired programmers to implement common technology everyone could use.

saagarjha 7y ago
> Every specialized field should have gold standard open source software like this. It sounds like this field will have it soon with Ghidra.

lol768 7y ago

Seems to be a common story in this area. I remember asking the Hopper folks if they'd do even an academic discount and it was similarly a no. Their argument was that it was on par with some academic textbooks .. maybe in the USA, but I never bought a textbook throughout my 3 year CS degree! That's what the library and electronic resources were for. I concede it was more accessibly priced than e.g. IDA but it's definitely a shame HexRays and others aren't as willing to allow non-commercial educational use. I think they'd benefit in the long run, you'd definitely have some folks using the products they're familiar with commercially after a few years. Meanwhile for software development, you have companies like JetBrains and GitHub offering premium products completely free of price.

saagarjha 7y ago
Hopper has (or used to have) student discounts…
- XMPPwocky 7y ago
  From my email in 2015, > Thank you for your interest in Hopper. Yes, I usually offer a 20% discount to students. If you are still interested, please let me know, and I’ll prepare an invoice for you.