4 ms·

I really don't get Hex Rays and their licensing. I've seen it first-hand a lot of times: The kind of tinkerers and hackers that would use this in their spare ti

by heipei 7y ago

I really don't get Hex Rays and their licensing. I've seen it first-hand a lot of times: The kind of tinkerers and hackers that would use this in their spare time usually won't spend even a dollar on software, but the minute they are hired by a large corporation they get an IDA license along with their laptop. They should release a free home version with mostly the same features (especially Hex-Rays, nobody uses IDA without it) and just prohibit commercial use in the terms of use. The kind of companies that already shell out tens of thousands every year for IDA licenses will happily oblige by the "no-commercial-use-with-the-home-edition" terms... If you want to curtail feature set then make a compelling set of features for enterprises (e.g. builtin collaboration, annotation sharing, fuzzy function search) and then make that exclusive to the commercial version, not the decompiler. Just my two cents...

saagarjha 7y ago
Considering the amount of concern put into detecting IDA piracy, making it that accessible seems counter to Hex-Ray’s goals.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  It's actually faintly amusing. I suppose if you're going to try and protect reverse engineering software against cracks, you're going to have to throw in a lot of effort or you're just wasting your time.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Hex-Rays throws in a fair amount of effort. (Apparently not enough, though, because IDA cracks do exist…)
jcranmer 7y ago
It used to be the case, a decade or so ago, that you could get IDA Free for, well, free. This was essentially the previous [major] version of IDA Pro, with fewer processors enabled, but otherwise pretty feature-complete. And then they changed their model so that IDA Free was a horribly gimped version that was useless: no save support, no scripting support (so you can't use it in other projects that use IDA for the disassembly parts), and it shuts itself off after a short amount of time.

by heipei 7y ago

saagarjha 7y ago

Considering the amount of concern put into detecting IDA piracy, making it that accessible seems counter to Hex-Ray’s goals.

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
It's actually faintly amusing. I suppose if you're going to try and protect reverse engineering software against cracks, you're going to have to throw in a lot of effort or you're just wasting your time.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Hex-Rays throws in a fair amount of effort. (Apparently not enough, though, because IDA cracks do exist…)

jcranmer 7y ago

It used to be the case, a decade or so ago, that you could get IDA Free for, well, free. This was essentially the previous [major] version of IDA Pro, with fewer processors enabled, but otherwise pretty feature-complete. And then they changed their model so that IDA Free was a horribly gimped version that was useless: no save support, no scripting support (so you can't use it in other projects that use IDA for the disassembly parts), and it shuts itself off after a short amount of time.