Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by sam_lowry_ on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @03:33AM (#19317272)

The pricing of Ida Pro is set to limit the size of the support work and to avoid liabilities. Do not know how it works now, but many years ago, as you were buying Ida Pro, they were asking questions and if anything seemed to imply that you want to hide the buyer's identity, they refused to sell.

That is, Hex-Rays do not want to have any business relationship with the proverbial would-be teenage hackers.

Outside of that, Hex-Rays is a small business which has probably around than 1mln eur/year of turnover and they do not want to grow it much more. It was a Basecamp-style business long before DHH made the concept of anti-growth popular.

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Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by thr0w__4w4y on Friday March 08, 2019 @09:00AM (#19337502)

It still works like that. I practically had to beg Hex Rays to take my money. They were very skeptical of me at initial purchase, it took about 2 hours of email exchange and phone calls.

When I went to renew my support, they grilled me again. This was just a few weeks ago. I gave up and figured Ghidra was just around the corner. Looking forward to trying it.

I emailed them and told them a) I didn't appreciate being treated like a criminal (won't get into the specifics, but one set of answers led to another set of questions, but I'm a consultant with my own company, website, physical address, company history, blog posts, etc. -- I work in security / reverse engineering of electronic devices)

I also told them I've never had to work so hard to give someone my money. Finally I gave up. Let the market speak.

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