[HN Gopher] Hex-rays is moving to a subscription model
___________________________________________________________________
Hex-rays is moving to a subscription model
Author : qw3rty01
Score : 74 points
Date : 2021-12-14 17:37 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hex-rays.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hex-rays.com)
| nice_byte wrote:
| i liked the old design on their website better. though this one
| fits better with the whole "software as a service" thing, i
| suppose.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I'm curious about the interplay of two items from their FAQ:
|
| > 10. What if I do not renew my subscription? If subscriptions
| are not renewed, you will lose access to the software on the day
| that a new subscription should have started. Please note that the
| software will stop working if not renewed.
|
| > 13. I have an IDA perpetual license, when do I have to change
| to a subscription? At the end of your current support period all
| renewals will be moved to the subscription model. We are offering
| our existing users an opportunity to pay only your current
| renewal price for your first year on the subscription plan.
|
| So maybe I'm mistaken, but it sounds like they're trying to
| renege on perpetual licenses?
| delusional wrote:
| Just below:
|
| > 14. What if I don't renew on the subscription plan? Existing
| users can continue to use the version of IDA Pro/Decompiler he
| have purchased under the perpetual license model indefinitely.
| However, they will not be able to receive product updates and
| tech support after the 12-month support expires. No re-
| downloads of past versions will be provided, so make sure to
| keep all necessary backups.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| That's a bit embarrassing, thanks for the correction.
|
| It didn't occur to me that some FAQ items would modify
| others, so I stopped reading at #13.
| catskul2 wrote:
| > 10. What if I do not renew my subscription?
|
| > 14. What if I don't renew on the subscription plan?
|
| Not sure how a contraction and the word "on the", "plan" make
| those separate questions...
| delusional wrote:
| I agree. It's confusingly written, you basically have to
| read the answer (or the previous question) to guess that
| it's about perpetual licenses.
| orra wrote:
| > No re-downloads of past versions will be provided
|
| Far, far bigger films get away with nonsense like this. But
| IMHO it's a violation of the CJEU case _UsedSoft GmbH v
| Oracle_ (paragraph 85).
| marcodiego wrote:
| This is what happens: you've got enough corporate clients
| dependent on your product; you know they can pay what you're
| asking and it would be even more expensive for them to invest in
| alternatives; you also see that alternatives will improve and
| take youR market in the long run, but when that happens will be
| already retired.
|
| I think we've seen this happen with other tools before.
| jchw wrote:
| IMO: IDA Home was the response to Ghidra. They could've raised
| or lowered rates without this change. But, subscriptions are
| probably a response to... perpetual licenses. Because I can
| keep using my current version of IDA forever, and with updates
| usually slower than the speed of smell it's pretty alluring
| sometimes. I mean fuck, IDA Pro hasn't updated since like
| April. Not because there's no bugs or no features that could be
| added, it just doesn't get that much updates in a year. This is
| not the worst thing and I am sure there's a reason, but yeah it
| makes the value proposition of keeping the support license
| alive a lot weaker.
|
| _Of course_ Hex Rays wants people to ditch perpetual licenses.
| Because I can just not pay and use my current IDA and Hex Rays
| licenses as long as I want. And at this point, I am probably
| going to do exactly that, and transition to greener pastures as
| I am able to.
|
| It's not like their licensing was generous before either.
| Before, you had to pay separately for each decompiler,
| including x86 vs x64, AND for each platform you want to run IDA
| on, you need _another full set_ of licenses. That fucking
| sucks. This new scheme may have improved some of that, but at
| the cost of perpetual licenses and both higher starting and
| renewal rates, it's extremely difficult to see this as a win.
|
| I wanted to like Hex Rays. The high cost was literally never an
| issue for me other than for accessibility reasons. The software
| is useful and featureful and the lack of annoying DRM was good.
| But this, plain ass sucks. Between IDA Home and subscriptions,
| it's hard to imagine how much harder Hex Rays could spit on
| home users other than flat out telling them to take a hike.
|
| And yeah, at the end of the day I'm sure a lot of thought went
| into this, but I hope the response doesn't go unheeded. I am
| _not_ downgrading to a subscription under _any_ conditions.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| As alternative tools like Ghidra or even some of the cheaper
| options like Hopper become more popular, I suspect Hex-Rays
| recognizes that corporate licenses are their bread and butter.
| From a business perspective it makes sense to squeeze as much out
| of these companies as they can get away with. The subscription
| costs are only a fraction of an annual salary.
|
| Unfortunately this leaves the hobbyist and individuals behind.
| ~$1K/year isn't out of the realm of what I pay for other tools,
| but it's really hard to justify it when I can open Ghidra and get
| 95% of the way there without the subscription model.
|
| IDA really is great for handling edge cases and obscure
| architectures, but I hope this last switch-up by Hex-Rays pushes
| even more developer attention toward improving the open-source
| alternatives.
| anonymousisme wrote:
| Ghidra has been publicly available for less than half the time
| of IDA/HexRays, but it has really caught up fast.
|
| https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/22676...
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Long ago, when I got my first paycheck, I "went legit" and
| bought licenses for TextMate, Sublime, and IDA. Long story
| short, HexRays took my $1000 and never gave me a working
| version of their software. Bastards. I'm so glad there is an
| alternative now.
|
| To this very day, whenever I'm stuck slogging through the build
| or debug process of a Ghidra plugin that has a more mature
| alternative in the IDA universe, I occasionally let a tiny bit
| of that resentment bubble to the surface to propel me across
| the finish line.
| rene77 wrote:
| Shenanigans like that the product owe to its author, Ilfak
| Guilfanov, who's a bit of a meme in the ex-USSR SRE
| community. Back in the '00s, when IDA pretty much had no
| alternative, one couldn't just buy it. No, to pay them money,
| you had to be either an estabilished name (ESET or Kaspersky
| worked just fine), or to subtly caress the author's ego until
| it gives. And I've seen paying customers being kicked off the
| support forum for asking uncomfortable questions, complete
| with rude private messages. I believe that at least twice,
| unrelated hackers took offense and leaked the full version
| anyway. Fun times.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Yeah, B2B is a wild world and this was my first time going
| for a ride. Ah well. You live you learn.
|
| Speaking of which, last time this came up on HN ilfak
| cruised into the comments a week later, all "I can not find
| your nickname in our database," and I didn't see the reply
| until a year later. Well, the HexRays database had no
| problem finding my-nickname-at-gmail for the purposes of
| bugging me to renew, and just in case anyone thinks I'm
| making this up, here's the order. I also have an email with
| the download link and serial number -- the ones that didn't
| work -- and the ghosted support requests spread throughout
| the following year.
|
| I'm sure this is a Hanlon's Razor thing, I just want to
| make sure that any naive young hackers considering the
| possibility of a last-time-buy on a perpetual license
| understand what they are getting into. **
| **********************************************************
| * Your order has been accepted. *******************
| *****************************************
| Please retain this receipt for your records.
| This e-mail confirms your order placed with Hex-Rays.
| Payment data ------------
| Beneficiary : Hex-Rays
| Address : Rue Rennequin
| Sualem 34
| BE-4000 Liege Website address
| : http://www.hex-rays.com General conditions
| : https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/t&c.pdf
| Order date : 15/05/2016 22:40:05
| Order reference :
| deWerd_4732_20160515 Ogone Payment reference
| : 3016168801 Order description
| : IDA license Total
| : 1129.00 USD Charging method
| : MasterCard XXXXXXXXXXXX---- Sub-brand
| : UNDEFINED Status
| : Authorised Authorisation code
| : ------
| no_time wrote:
| Did you do a bank chargeback? Losing $1k like that is
| brutal.
| vizzah wrote:
| Should have done, of course. Most likely you were
| suspected to be buying for a warez group release =)
| saagarjha wrote:
| > IDA really is great for handling edge cases and obscure
| architecture
|
| I find Ghidra to be much better at this, since people actually
| write loafers for it and you get a decompiler "for free".
| megous wrote:
| True. I wanted to analyze some or1k binaries. No IDA support.
| Two weekends, and I had a disassembler and decompiler for the
| architecture, without writing any Java code. Just amazing.
|
| You don't even need to describe the whole instruction set,
| just all the instructions that your target binary uses.
|
| Such an amazing thing. And or1k is a nasty architecture with
| delay slots, which makes manual assembly reading quite
| tedious, etc. So the decompiler "C" output is very useful in
| this situation. I was in awe.
| bri3d wrote:
| Agreed. I find IDA to be much better than Ghidra for common
| things: Windows C++ or Delphi applications and ARM
| Objective-C where the heuristic guided decompiler really
| shines and Ghidra gets lost easily.
|
| For the obscure architectures Ghidra does support, it's way
| better than IDA by virtue of having a decompiler alone. Even
| if the decompilation is subtly wrong, the broad strokes are
| so much easier to navigate that finding the right method to
| go through by hand is much easier.
|
| And once you dive into Ghidra's P-Code IR and more advanced
| plugin support and move beyond existing IDA plugins, it's
| honestly better than IDA for things nobody has done before.
|
| Now, there are some obscure architectures like C167 for which
| we still lack a working Ghidra processor model, but this is
| only a matter of time - and once it comes, it will already be
| way ahead of IDA!
| nekitamo wrote:
| By squeezing out hobbyists and individuals, they're shooting
| themselves in the foot over the long term.
|
| The only reason any corporation I worked for purchased IDA Pro
| licenses was because I recommended it. The only reason I
| recommended it is because I could (barely) afford a personal
| license, and play with it in my own time.
|
| Going forward they're going to miss out on this word-of-mouth
| marketing, which I expect will negatively affect sales
| expansion going forward.
| ohazi wrote:
| They should probably supplement this "expensive corporate
| SaaS pricing" model with a "free for personal use" option if
| they want to have any hope of maintaining their standing.
| wila wrote:
| You mean like this?
|
| https://hex-rays.com/ida-free/
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Not sure if they've changed things because I haven't
| bought a product from them for almost 10 years, but back
| then the free option was several releases behind the
| current offering, and lacking many features. Also, back
| then there was _NO_ free version of HexRays (a separate
| product).
| bri3d wrote:
| As of May of this year, IDA Free is a lot less broken
| now, so they are making some progress. It's no longer
| ancient and it has the same "cloud based" Hex-Rays that
| the Home version does, albeit only for x64.
| spijdar wrote:
| Home also only comes with the x64 "cloud" decompiler, at
| least if you buy the x86 version.
|
| Having paid for a home license last year (mostly for the
| ability to run Python scripts) and discovering the home
| version has a sabotaged python implementation (can only
| run scripts individually from the GUI instead of running
| them from the command line, and you don't get the toolkit
| to develop scripts/plugins), it seems kind of hilarious
| that the free version is so close in feature set to Home.
| What's the difference even? They're both for "non-
| commercial use only", is the (limited) python script
| interface the only reason to pay $365 a year now? That,
| Lumina, and email support?
| FineTralfazz wrote:
| Maybe it's improved since, but last time I used IDA free
| the cloud decompiler was buggy and weird and it was
| overall a mediocre experience. I don't see why anyone
| would choose to use it instead of Ghidra unless they were
| explicitly trying to learn IDA because it's the industry
| standard, and I don't see it holding that position long-
| term unless they improve their free/cheap offerings.
| TOMDM wrote:
| They only lose out in the long term by doing this if you
| believe they can compete in the long term.
|
| If you're an exec at Hex-rays and you believe that Ghidra
| will eventually out compete you, then it makes sense to
| squeeze every penny you can before you're irrelevant.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Does Hex Rays have an exec team? I thought it was just
| Ilfak and a couple others.
| livinginfear wrote:
| > We have halved the price of our products on this new model and
| hope that it will allow more users to access the software.
|
| I love the gall they have to say this.
|
| When I saw the headline, I thought that a subscription model
| might provide more amenable pricing than the USD$1800 for IDAPro,
| and actually give access to more users. At this pricing, they've
| absolutely ensured that I never pay again. IDAPro is already a
| product that's diminishing in comparison to the competition year
| after year.
| ebeip90 wrote:
| 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."
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| rene77 wrote:
| 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.
| z2 wrote:
| 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?
| dragontamer wrote:
| > 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...
| rene77 wrote:
| 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.
| unbanned wrote:
| No it doesn't, it also has a level of protection built in to
| stop decompiling itself
| dymk wrote:
| 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
| marcodiego wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| You mean decompiled code? Reverse engineered code is just
| code that someone wrote to match the existing functionality
| of something else.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Yeah, right. I mixed up things. Clean-room reverse
| engineering is, AFAIK, legal.
| GlitchMr wrote:
| 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.
| nekitamo wrote:
| I've been a customer since ~2010, and have been paying out of my
| personal pocket the $469 / year support renewal for a standard
| IDA Pro named license, which I've carried with me through various
| jobs in my career.
|
| The new subscription model will almost double my costs ($900 /
| year), all while I've been getting less and less value with each
| update. Furthermore if I ever stop paying, I will lose access to
| the product.
|
| Whereas if I stop paying now, I will maintain indefinite access
| to what I currently have.
|
| I think I simply won't renew next year, and will rely on Ghidra
| to fill any gaps going forward.
| ljhsiung wrote:
| I'm a big fan of the radare2 suite. The integration of its
| ecosystem/plugin support is phenomenal.
|
| Only the decompiler is better in Ghidra, IMO, but I'm sure
| there's a plugin for that.
| ShrigmaMale wrote:
| There is. Rizin also has some interesting improvements (like
| mew save by serialization of state instead if command
| sequence) which is nice since it initially looked like a CoC
| fork.
| squid_demon wrote:
| Just make sure you get the latest Ghidra update with the log4j
| issue addressed :)
| ShrigmaMale wrote:
| The real reason for many subscription models is to juice more
| revenue from users, charging over time allows for a higher
| price with less sticker shock.
| errantspark wrote:
| The real reason for the software as a service model is that
| it makes it easier to extract/capture value. Many SaaS
| offerings would be better at providing value to customers
| with non-SaaS architectures, unfortunately providing value to
| customers is second to providing value to shareholders.
|
| Don't pay for SaaS, don't encourage this bullshit. If foss
| offerings don't cover your usecase piracy is better for
| humanity than paying.
| echelon wrote:
| So don't pay the engineers that built the product and
| continue to maintain it?
|
| That's fine with fixed priced software if the software is
| static and frozen in time, but most software is living and
| breathing and requires continual investment.
|
| You can absolutely use an old WordStar license. In fact,
| several notable authors do.
| vmception wrote:
| There was once set of Christmas themed console controllers
| (one Red, one Green) with the model name "Profit Driver"
|
| For whatever reason at the time, that opened my mind to why
| people do things
| jdefr89 wrote:
| BinaryNinja... Switch to that.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Furthermore if I ever stop paying, I will lose access to the
| product.
|
| Wow, not even a perpetual fallback license?
|
| I wasn't super thrilled when Jetbrains switched to a more
| subscription-based system, but being grandfathered in (so I
| didn't have to restart the subscriptions as if I were a new
| client), the heaps of existing goodwill they'd built up, made
| the changeover much less of an issue, and super importantly
| finally listening to customer and adding perpetual fallback
| licenses alleviated much of the fear.
| noasaservice wrote:
| As an aside, "grandfathered in" is a historically terrible
| term. The term you're looking for is a "legacy license".
|
| It's not terribly well known just how terrible this phrase
| actually is. I ran across it myself probably a few months
| back.
|
| > "If all these white people are going to be noncitizens
| along with blacks, the idea is going to lose a lot of
| support," says James Smethurst, who teaches African-American
| studies at the University of Massachusetts. The solution? A
| half-dozen states passed laws that made men eligible to vote
| if they had been able to vote before African-Americans were
| given the franchise (generally, 1867), or if they were the
| lineal descendants of voters back then. This was called the
| grandfather clause. Most such laws were enacted in the early
| 1890s.
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586.
| ..
| johnhowardstein wrote:
| NO! Speak English like how I want you to!
|
| Do you know how you sound?
| exolymph wrote:
| But if virtually nobody who uses the term knows that
| "grandfathered in" has an unsavory past, does it really
| cause much harm to use that phrase?
| [deleted]
| TkTech wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. It's finally passed the point where I'd
| rather spend a few slow weekends adding missing QoL features to
| Ghidra then renew IDA.
| MikeBVaughn wrote:
| I really like IdaPro, but this guarantees that I move to Ghidra.
|
| I think the worst part though is the bit about prohibiting future
| re-downloads for users who bought perpetual licenses in the past.
| The sort of company that pulls that nonsense is _very precisely
| not_ the kind of company I expect to provide a good customer
| experience in a subscription product /service.
|
| That is absolutely, 100% a complete deal breaker when it comes to
| the prospect of me ever doing business with Hex-Rays.
| ntauthority wrote:
| > I think the worst part though is the bit about prohibiting
| future re-downloads for users who bought perpetual licenses in
| the past. The sort of company that pulls that nonsense is very
| precisely not the kind of company I expect to provide a good
| customer experience in a subscription product/service.
|
| IDA never offered redownloads past the end of your 'support
| period'. As their last renewal email to me said:
|
| > Please check our web site and the protected area for new
| files. If you find anything interesting or useful, feel free to
| download it immediately. Once your support period is over, the
| server will not prepare new download links!
| MikeBVaughn wrote:
| Thanks for catching that! The core point still stands,
| though, I think that approach is customer-hostile and
| entirely at odds with the sort of customer service I expect
| from a company offering a subscription.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Does anyone know whether it is possible to purchase a legacy
| license (and don't expect any update once they move to
| subscription model) for IDA right now? I'm preparing to get into
| reverse engineering but haven't looked into IDA because I'm still
| sharpening up my C, assembly and Operating System skills.
|
| Actually, for a hobbyist, maybe the Home edition is good enough?
| It does have Pytho scripting capacity, local debugger (I guess I
| can just use Windbg for windows) and decompiler (although it's
| cloud based so I'm not sure what does it mean).
|
| _Edit_ just checked the quote for IDA Pro and it 's some 5000+
| USD, it's a bit heavy for me.
| marcodiego wrote:
| https://ghidra-sre.org/
| unixhero wrote:
| Ah the good old death of good tools.
| TavsiE9s wrote:
| I hope Ghidra and alternatives take their customers.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Another one bites the dust. It's fortunate we have ghidra all
| though it can't compete yet on feature level. I guess the
| positive thing is that ghidra development will accelerate now.
| rene77 wrote:
| Ghidra's existance is a bit unfortunate, really. While it was
| released relatively recently, it's already a dated product
| permanently stuck with a clunky UI. And by being free, it'll
| create an extremely high bar for possible commercial products
| to clear. Combined with the extremely small market of low-cost
| SRE tools (so small in fact, that Hopper's author decided
| against porting their tool to Windows), we'll be stuck with IDA
| and Ghidra (and all their idiosyncrasies) for the next decade
| at least. Which is a damn shame.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I don't think Ghidras existence is unfortunate at all.
| Without it I, and a few people I know, would never have even
| touched this space. Ghidra is not perfect but a slick GUI is
| not something that is important in such a product.
| ahepp wrote:
| The market is guaranteed to stay small if the "hobbyist"
| version of the software is $350/y. I've heard great things
| about it, but that's pretty far outside the "try it out for
| fun" range. I had a lot of fun experimenting with hardware
| hacking and dumping the firmware of an ARM device I own, but
| I'm certainly not paying $350 for one architecture for one
| year just to explore whether or not I like reverse
| engineering. What about kids hacking raspberry pis?
|
| I respect people's right to sell software, but I'm tempted to
| crack out the world's tiniest violin when I hear people
| complain that FOSS is eating their lunch. Consider how much
| good FOSS compilers have done for the world, and how many
| more people were able to program computers that otherwise
| would never have been able to afford it.
| rene77 wrote:
| I believe the pricing is high by necessity - we're talking
| about employing some dozen of people on the higher end of
| competency doing terribly unexciting work. Hobbyists should
| settle on the Hopper tool, which is $99 a year.
|
| Also, if you wanted to advocate for FOSS, compilers are an
| all around terrible example. In fact, they prove my point:
| thanks to GCC and the likes, we're still stuck with
| hodgepodge of fragile build systems, platform-dependent
| code and poor IDE integrations. Hell, modern programmers
| will be right at home with 1988's compilers, seeing how
| Makefiles are still somehow relevant even today.
|
| Compare that with the early 90's Turbo Pascal which had an
| IDE with a built-in help system, a build system, a
| debugger, and a profiler. We could've had competition to
| improve upon all that, and instead it's 2021, and you have
| to spend hours per project to keep the tooling from
| breaking. In my carreer, I've probably spent more paid
| hours setting up "free" tooling than I paid for commercial
| tools. It's just a sad lose-lose situation for everyone.
| [deleted]
| no_time wrote:
| >doing terribly unexciting work.
|
| You mean writing reverse reverse engineering tools?
| Personally I can hardly think of a more exciting job.
|
| Also blaming GCC for today's dev experience is just
| wrong. With some notable exceptions(VS debugger), the
| situation over at Microsoft is just as bad and in no way
| influenced by GCC.
| rene77 wrote:
| Oh, believe me, it's boring as hell. It's just endless
| hours of making sense of incomplete hardware manuals,
| converting tables to code by hand and handling subtle
| hardware differences. And what I did was console game
| modding - something that did look exciting at the time.
| IDA itself must be even worse, seeing how its codebase is
| two decades old by now.
|
| As for the modern dev experience, what else do you
| expect? FOSS starved small software vendors by raising
| the bar for commercial software, so Microsoft has barely
| any competition in their field. Sure, there's JetBrains
| software, but that's it?
| MikeBVaughn wrote:
| I say this as someone who worked on another Eclipse SWT
| application that I think is very good, is still in use, and
| that I am very proud to have worked on, but the SWT UI is the
| one thing I absolutely hate about Ghidra. I feel like many
| aspects of that specific school of 00's enterprise-Java-
| application UX design aged about as well as a wheel of goat
| cheese left on the dash of a car on a 90-degree summer day.
| (In particular, when using SWT applications, I find the
| buttons and layout to be cluttered and hard-to-parse - for
| me, the bars of small, densely packed buttons are frustrating
| to work with. Also, something about the iconography in those
| programs is generally opaque and ends up making me feel kind
| of stupid.)
| rene77 wrote:
| Doesn't this just prove that Ghidra is actually very, very
| old? By the UX alone, I'd place it in the 2003-2006 range,
| the time when the excitement of Mac OS X turned into a new
| generation of bombastic widget toolkits.
| loves_mangoes wrote:
| Taking away the option of perpetual licenses is an interesting
| business decision. Jetbrains makes the subscription model work,
| but they also do give you a permanent license to older versions
| after 1 year of subscription (which is a great incentive to keep
| people renewing!)
|
| Historically, IDA Pro's sales and licensing has always been a bit
| of a headache for customers. I could understand that the OPEX
| model makes it easier for some companies to keep renewing.
|
| That just goes to show that I'm not their target market. Even if
| IDA had a pay-what-you-want option, the 10-20 I'd be willing to
| pay per month while using a leaked version is clearly completely
| negligible compared to what they normally charge.
|
| And I'm happy to just use Ghidra instead of bothering with an IDA
| leak, so I suspect this announcement might simplify things for
| their existing corp users, but it'll probably not do a great job
| of expanding the home userbase.
| skoskie wrote:
| Jetbrains is also just $5/mo for the one app I use, and I get a
| lot of functionality for that.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Jetbrains makes the subscription model work, but they also do
| give you a permanent license to older versions after 1 year of
| subscription
|
| That happened _after_ they announced the switch to a
| subscription model to overwhelmingly negative feedback.
| ygjb wrote:
| You do realize that is a _win_ from a customer service and
| reputation perspective? Jetbrains listened to their
| customers, and amended their model. That is the kind of
| responsiveness I would appreciate in a vendor, especially if
| it 's a vendor that produces tools that I enjoy using or help
| me make money.
|
| Anyone who has worked on customer facing projects or tools
| know there is always overwhelmingly negative feedback to
| billing increases. What is less common is vendors being
| responsive to that in a way that is actually beneficial to
| customers. That is doubly the case when you are dealing with
| high quality, specialty tools that have free or open source
| competitors that are good enough to get by, but not great
| (Adobe suite vs various free and open tools, for example).
| dcminter wrote:
| JetBrains had a mis-step on the way to that model (but had the
| sense to listen to their customers):
| https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/18/final-update-on-t...
| jchw wrote:
| Dear Hex Rays: I'm not switching to subscription for these
| prices. Signed, a paying customer with multiple licenses, and
| future Ghidra user.
| 0xbadc0de5 wrote:
| I had used IDA+HexRays for a few years between 2009 - 2017 but
| abandoned it entirely in favor of Binary Ninja and Ghidra (and to
| a lesser extent Hopper and Radare).
|
| While IDA certainly has the first mover advantage, I've found
| that Binja and Ghidra in combination are able to achieve full
| coverage of my targets. If you're just targeting x86, you can
| probably get away fine with Ghidra. Although I've found for non
| x86 ISA's, Ghidra and Binja each have better or worse support for
| certain arch's but the ven diagrams overlap to full coverage.
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