
IDA Home is coming - custardfan5
https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida-home-is-coming/
======
roblabla
Too little, too late. I'll keep using Ghidra, which is free, open source, and
doesn't crash every time I look at it wrong, thank you very much.

Ghidra is absolutely amazing - I've been using it since release and it's been
a huge breath of fresh air compared to the hot mess IDA is. Ghidra has great
APIs, which are really well documented. It has a very powerful decompiler. It
comes with a built-in, programable emulator for every platform! It has a
built-in way to do collaborative reverse engineering! And it's super easy to
modify the Sleigh if there's something that needs tweaking to improve the
decompiler output!

Not to mention, adding your own CPU is reasonably simple - all you have to do
is write a "Sleigh" description of your architecture (basically map CPU
instructions to PCode) and it gives you the disassembler, decompiler, and
emulator for free.

~~~
bogomipz
I've only just heard of Ghidra so I was happy to see your comment. I had a
quick question - what is the learning curve like for Ghidra?

I noticed earlier this week that there is a forthcoming book from NoStarch
about Ghidra. There's a sample chapter available in case anyone is interested:

[https://nostarch.com/GhidraBook](https://nostarch.com/GhidraBook)

~~~
brunoqc
coupon: OPERATION

------
xvilka
Note, there is a free and open-source alternative for both the console world
and GUI one - radare2[1] + Cutter[2] combo. Both are native and highly
portable, no Java inside. And they support various decompilers, including
Ghidra'one[3] and Retdec[4].

[1]
[https://github.com/radareorg/radare2](https://github.com/radareorg/radare2)

[2] [https://github.com/radareorg/cutter](https://github.com/radareorg/cutter)

[3] [https://github.com/radareorg/r2ghidra-
dec](https://github.com/radareorg/r2ghidra-dec)

[4]
[https://github.com/avast/retdec-r2plugin](https://github.com/avast/retdec-r2plugin)

~~~
cjbprime
Any news on debugger integration with Cutter? The combination of working
decompiler and stable debugger would get me to switch for sure.

~~~
xvilka
Debugger works already. There is a room for improvement, but basic features
are here already.

~~~
cjbprime
Hm, I think I tried it once and it just crashed immediately on a simple
binary. Is this r2's debugger or gdb/lldb?

~~~
xvilka
It's r2 debugger that supports native mode for all platforms, remote gdb/lldb,
remote WinDbg, and a few more exotic options. Both Cutter and radare2 are
developed with quite a pace, if you meet any bug - reach us and we'll try to
fix it as soon as possible. This year we were accepted into Google Summer of
Code 2020, and students will work on a few interesting projects [1].

[1]
[https://www.radare.org/gsoc/2020/ideas.html](https://www.radare.org/gsoc/2020/ideas.html)

------
alasdair_
Hex Rays need to take a look at how JetBrains (IntelliJ) handled the same
problem.

Initially, most students and home users I knew used a cracked copy because
there was no way in hell any of the students I knew had a spare $500 to pay
for an IDE.

JetBrains seemed to realize this so first, they made a "self purchase" option
that was half the price (or less) and belonged solely to the developer that
bought it, with the caveat that they had to use their own funds. It could be
used commercially too - this was the option to take if your boss couldn't be
convinced to buy you a commercial license and you still wanted to use it
legally.

Next, they made their tools free for people working on open source projects.

Then they made a version that had almost all the features available for free
(it may have originally been only for non-commercial use but it's fine to use
commercially now).

Then they worked with Google to make their free tool the default for Android
development, which added many more users.

Then they switched to a monthly licensing scheme that was about $12 a month
for a single product (while retaining the ability to outright buy a copy if
you wanted to).

Almost everything that IntelliJ does is possible with open source competitors,
but I still pay for it because of the level of polish they apply to each
feature and the intuitiveness of each feature.

I think that if a $12/month copy was available initially, the number of
cracked copies being used would have gone down dramatically.

EDIT: Photoshop did something similar. NO ONE I knew that used it for home use
had a real license because it was so damn expensive, but I know plenty of
people paying $15/month or so for access.

~~~
tomc1985
Unlike Adobe, JetBrains will periodically give you a perpetual license for the
most recent version. I really wish Adobe would do this.

------
daeken
I've been using IDA Pro for over 15 years, for hobbies and my job, and I am
thoroughly unimpressed with this offering. I get that Ghidra is eating their
lunch, but this is a poor attempt to claw back some marketshare. Unless your
only job is doing Windows malware analysis, this just isn't going to cut it;
no decompiler and single CPU family both kill it.

In any given month, it's likely I'll end up disassembling x86-64, AArch64, and
MIPS at the very least; that would cost me nearly $1200/year to do that as a
hobbyist using IDA Home, or $0/year with Ghidra. For me, there's huge value in
the muscle memory I've built with IDA, and generally I get my job to pay for a
license, but the odds of me still using it in 2025 are quickly dwindling to
zero. They need to make a big, big change or they're going to lose all of us.

------
jchw
Swing and a miss.

My problem with IDA Pro isn’t even the license cost. It’s the licensing
unfairness. Costs get multiplied a bunch of times if you want to work across
multiple host OSes or want both 32 bit and 64 bit decompilation for an
architecture.

I’m sure they know this stuff drives away home users, hence IDA Home. Where
they miss, is what home users do. Home users do _everything_. I’ve seen people
using Ghidra with 8-bit processors.

I don’t imagine things will continue to work out well with this strategy if
Ghidra gets support for debugging and continues to receive improvements for
its decompiler. Ghidra is already immensely useful _today_.

~~~
HHad3
I am wondering whether there is a management issue at Hex-Rays. The newly
released company website features a page which appears to advertise against
the product [1], because it entirely misses who their audience is.

The core point made regarding why IDA is a superior product despite license
unfairness is vendor support. However, the authors seem to miss that the
target audience of IDA are tinkerers, who would be fine with fixing their own
tools as long as the issues are only on the surface.

Hex-Rays is not Oracle, who can afford to live from license unfairness because
their product is embedded deeply into the livelihood of so many large
companies. Hex-Rays provides just a tool, which I have already replaced by
Cutter with Radare2 and Ghidra's decompiler in my workflow.

I would not use IDA Home even if it was free due to its limitations and lack
of Hex-Rays' Decompiler.

[1] [https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/compelling-reasons-
to-...](https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/compelling-reasons-to-use-ida/)

~~~
lallysingh
Holy crap that's an awful website. It stinks of clueless desperation. I wasn't
sure about trying Ghidra until seeing that site.

~~~
kube-system
Wow I don't think I've ever seen marketing that bad that wasn't satire.

It is literally shit-talking their own product.

> Isn’t IDA an aging software?

> Doesn’t it have shortcomings?

> Or structural limitations?

> Also… It’s closed source, right?

> And how about its high price tag?

> Well sure [...]

I didn't have half of these preconceptions before reading this page.... but
now I do.

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

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
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
Hex-Rays throws in a fair amount of effort. (Apparently not enough, though,
because IDA cracks do exist…)

------
ZeroCool2u
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.

~~~
lol768
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
Hopper has (or used to have) student discounts…

~~~
XMPPwocky
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.

------
tux3
If this is a reaction to Ghidra, I'm really glad Hex-Rays is reacting
positively to the competition! I'm not an IDA Pro customer, but I know people
have been asking for something like this for years. I'm actually tempted to
buy this.

But that said, I'm still pretty wary about IDA's sales process. There seems to
be many negative stories, talking about what a frustrating & arbitrary
experience it has been in the past. If even Tavis Ormandy is being treated
poorly, that doesn't give me much confidence as a prospective Home user.
Hopefully things will have improved substantially!

And then there's little things like Linux and Windows licenses being sold
separately, so I have a choice between running IDA in Wine, or almost doubling
the price I'm being quoted.

But still, I think this is a very promising move! And the price might seem
high for hobbyist use now that there are very high quality free alternatives,
but compared to the previous high four digits quotes it's practically a
bargain =]

Let's see where this goes.

~~~
jjoonathan
> I'm still pretty wary about IDA's sales process.

Yeah, I got bit.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19316240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19316240)

Hopefully the site redesign means they've given other parts of their sales
process some love, too: in particular, their self-service tool and their
policy of forbidding people from registering personal licenses to personal
emails.

EDIT: Looks like I got a reply from ilfak himself, but it was 6 days later and
I didn't see it. If anyone from hex-rays is listening, here's a subject line
with some order numbers in it: "Hex-Rays Invoice 2016-2240 orderID: (my-last-
name)_4732_20160515". My email is (HN-username)@gmail. I never did get that
license working, I'd greatly appreciate a reset.

~~~
ilfak
Since you gave more details, we could check it out and the outcome is: you
gave us your professional email address and we sent your license to it. So,
from our perspective, it looks like a successfully completed transaction. As
you have confirmed, you even received the invoice. You never came back with
any complaints, so my guess is that you received your license. Now, 4 years
later, you are saying that the license was not working. What was the problem
and why did you never contact us?

------
hannibalhorn
I find Hopper Disassembler just as good and the price is certainly much more
reasonable, especially when it's for occasional use - I get out a disassembler
to figure out undocumented/weird behavior maybe 4-5 times a year. IDA just
isn't the only game in town anymore..

------
lawnchair_larry
Sorry Hex Rays, your licensing is still poor, and you ignored your potential
and former customers for too long. Ghidra for life.

------
dang
Ok, it's coming, but there's no harm in waiting until it gets here. This is an
announcement of an announcement. Those are off-topic. A thread now just
duplicates whatever discussion will happen later, only generically and with
less information.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22no%20harm%20in%20waiting%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20announcement%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

Edit: well, this thread is unusually good, so maybe we'll relax the objection
this time.

------
mmm_grayons
Ghidra is better than IDA for almost every use case I've found. I was working
on reversing a bunch of mipsel binaries; Ghidra's decompiler worked, IDA
didn't. I also tried r2 with Cutter, which did a decent job and had by far the
slickest UI. Just my two cents.

------
mmxmb
"IDA Home has been exclusively designed to bring the experience of IDA Pro to
reverse-engineers hobbyists, for the equivalent of 1$ a day!"

I find it strange to imply that a RE hobbyist would use this software every
single day.

~~~
matz1
a lot of hobby is much more expensive than that...

------
beefhash
What even is this timeline anymore.

Though I don't see this recapturing the casual reverse engineering market that
Ghidra ate for lunch unless they have very compelling IDA Home pricing for the
decompilers as well (the “One processor family of choice from the most common
processors: PC, ARM, M68K, MIPS, PPC” statement is kind of vague about that).

------
banachtarski
Note: I reverse in my spare time and have occasionally been called on to
reverse at work. I find subscription based pricing for software like this
completely disagreeable.

~~~
non-entity
The only subscription for desktop software I've found I liked is Jetbrains and
that's mostly due to me getting their entire product line dirt cheap.

~~~
mdaniel
They also have a "perpetual fallback license," though which the product
becomes __yours __after a year or so; thus, you 're incentivized to stay on
the subscription, but if you decide to get off the train then your software
doesn't evaporate (:eyes: 1Password.com)

[https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-
gb/articles/207240845](https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-
gb/articles/207240845)

------
non-entity
I've only recently gotten into reverse engineering as a hobby recently and
have so far just used Ida Free and Ghidra to stuff. From what I've read it
seems a lot of people are disappointed on the lack of the decompiler being
included with this. How good is Ida's decompiler? I've tried using the Ghidra
decompiler, and tbh I'd rather just stick with raw assembly than what normally
gets generated from that.

~~~
roblabla
Ghidra and IDA's decompiler are fairly similar in my experience. There are
some specific situations when one is better than the other, but overall both
do a really good job at recovering the control flow. One thing IDA has that I
miss from Ghidra is a way to split/merge variables from the UI. In IDA, I can
tell the decompiler that two variables are actually the same, and it will
merge them.

------
sickygnar
IDA's license was too expensive for someone who wants to tinker, which is
probably most people who want to use it. I almost feel bad for hex-rays now
though, it's gotta be tough to compete with an excellent, free, state-
sponsored tool like Ghidra. I would have gladly paid a reasonably, hobbyist
monthly license fee for IDA for what I was doing (video game reversing in my
free time). If I were using it professionally I would have paid for a
professional license. It doesn't seem like hex-rays trusts anyone though -
unsurprising considering their domain.

------
inamberclad
Sounds like everyone like Ghidra now. I know people were leery of NSA tech at
first, but people's opinions have changed?

~~~
tW4r
Ghidra is open source so it makes it a bit easier to trust NSA on this

------
Thaxll
So the decompiler is not included?

~~~
ship_it
No, sorry

------
adamnemecek
$365 is still a lot for a hobbyist. Also I'm always entertained when Europeans
put the dollar sign after the amount as opposed to before (I'm also European
and it took me forever to notice this).

~~~
solarkraft
I do it intentionally, to annoy back the americans who write stuff like €30
... and because it makes sense zo me to write the unit after the value, or at
least have a standard way of doing it.

~~~
Cu3PO42
I hate to break it to you, but where currency symbols are placed is mostly a
language convention and not so much dependent on the the currency itself. €30
is very much correct when speaking English. In fact, it is the style
recommended in the European Commission's style guide [1].

That means there is a standard way of doing it, it just depends on your
language. If you were speaking German you'd also write 30,00$ and not $30.00.
All of that said, I agree that the inconsistency with all other units is weird
and unnecessary, but languages just are that way sometimes.

[1]
[https://publications.europa.eu/code/en/en-370303.htm#positio...](https://publications.europa.eu/code/en/en-370303.htm#position)

~~~
solarkraft
Interesting, thanks for the guideline. I'm not sure what to think about it
yet, since I'm also referring to consistency towards other units (nobody
writes "cm 20").

------
fredsanford
Well, I think Johnny and Deneice said it better than I ever could...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3ceb5OVG7k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3ceb5OVG7k)

------
nikanj
Does this only support 64-bit applications? In the Windows world, apps are
still about 50/50\. Does it include the decompiler?

------
zerr
How big is the legit usage demand for this? I imagine the vast majority of
users are crackers.

~~~
cjbprime
Do you mean crackers as in people doing illegal things? Malware analysis and
exploit development are two large professional subfields of infosec.

~~~
zerr
Yeah, those who produce patchers (i.e. cracks) and keygens for proprietary
software, which is quite a big scene.

