I'm not arguing that a capable free alternative is a bad thing. I think there's an industry business case study in what Hex-Rays could have done to keep this from happening, though.
Is the fact that Hex-Rays is Russian one of the reasons why Ghidra exists? (Honest question.) If so, is there anything they could have done differently?
Sounds like every developer working on an open source stack.
Market forces are often reined in, eg by human rights, those things aren't part of the market operating they're mitigations of the damaging effects. In this case it's an external force (gov action), not the market, that has created the availability of the product.
Large player in widget market has low marginal cost and deep pockets, sells widgets at marginal cost its competitors can't match. Also totally normal market practice.
Competitors exit market or are relegated to minor market share, leaving de facto sole survivor. Also totally normal market practice.
We could be talking about chrome just as easily as IDA pro here.
I'm not sure the exact same thing could have been said which to me seems like a testament to how complicated software pricing can be. Web servers never really sold†, platform vendors eventually figured out it's better for them for compilers to be free (non-platform vendors still sell compilers), etc.
† back in the 90s, Netscape used to pester web companies to make their Apache installs lie that they are Netscape web servers.
In the past, the same could have been said of compilers and even web server and mail server software.
> many [most?] fields where people routinely decompile stuff are very highly compensated.
If it's more freely available, and more people have experience with it, then the compensation might go down as the supply of people with this experience goes up. I'm not sure using salary as a justification of what a tool price should be makes a whole lot of sense. to me, it just sounds like an inefficient market because there's not enough competition (justification on the ground that it does much more than any competitor and thus can command a premium does though).