My personal reason for not pirating IDA Pro is because I don't want to contribute to the problem. It's one thing to argue about the effects of piracy on things like video games, where the unit price is much cheaper, and a large number of users are casual users who mostly are going to buy legitimate copies if it's convenient and not exorbitantly expensive.
Power user software, like Photoshop, IDA Pro, VMWare, etc. are a different story. They provide tremendous value to both companies and individuals and yet I have no doubt an enormous amount of their poweruser userbase simply have never paid for them. As a young adult or child with no practical way to get a license, this is pretty innocuous since frankly it's hard to argue any sale was lost. But there's plenty of cases where large companies and of course hobbyist users end up pirating the tools they use. I believe Windows XP shipped with some audio files that were produced with a pirated version of Sony Soundforge, for example. That's just silly, but.. it happened.
IDA Pro is an excellent piece of software. They provide a freeware version, which is a pretty nice thing to do. And while the licenses are expensive I have no doubt it is worth it to the companies that purchase it, many times over.
Sadly, I can't afford IDA (as I've discussed eerily recently in HN comments, actually) so I've been mostly avoiding it for now, but I do buy other software, including Windows licenses, Adobe Creative Suite, VMWare, etc. If they're useful enough for me to use, then as an adult with decent income, I pay for them.
> yet I have no doubt an enormous amount of their poweruser userbase simply have never paid for them.
Do keep in mind that many of these companies expect users to pirate their software. Indeed, piracy is ironically part of what has made Adobe such a big player - teenagers pirating software in highschool, and using it up until their first job, make it their go-to tool when they actually do enter a company. Often leaving the company with no choice but Photoshop!
So if you are not paying to IDA's authors either way, what is the difference?
I'd say, by learning to use IDA through a pirated version you create a possibility that one day you will use it for something more serious and you or your employers will pay for it.
One possible argument against that is that by learning how to use all IDA features through a pirated version, you erase the competitive advantage of people who can afford to pay right from the start and remove their incentive to pay.
To that I'd say you would be just levelling the playing field :)
Somebody sort of casually pirated a copy of IDA Pro back in the mid-2000s (IIRC, he shared his copy on a public server). The IDA people (DataRescue, at the time, but from what I recall the page survived the move to Hex-Rays) found out, banned him from using IDA, and then put a page on their website threatening to rescind IDA licenses from any company that employed him. The IDA team is pretty aggro.
To be fair, there's definitely a difference between downloading a pirated version of software, and actually leaking copies of software for others to pirate. The DataRescue and now Hex-Rays folks seem particularly sensitive to leaked copies and I imagine leaked copies genuinely do affect their bottom line of sales given the kinds of markets they're in.
They certainly seemed to be very much against selling it to private individuals (or were when I asked many years ago).
I guess unless you've got a CV which says "presented at Defcon and Blackhat, five times" or "currently work at {big infosec company}", even if you can afford it the answer will be "nope".
The end result for me was that I bought a Mac Mini and a copy of Hopper and Synalyze It. My entire reverse-engineering of the Polaroid film recorder driver (and the resulting Linux port) was done by reversing the driver DLL in Hopper and shimming the driver and ASPI calls with PyDbg.
I keep looking away for a month or so and finding a new version of Hopper with shiny new features to play with...
