[z2]

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]

> 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]

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.

[dymk]

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

[olliej]

Copyright law is what you're after.

Patent law doesn't care about how you get to the same thing - independent invention does not work as a defense.

IANAL, I'm a random on HN, if you take this as legal advice I don't know what to tell you :D

[unbanned]

No it doesn't, it also has a level of protection built in to stop decompiling itself

[marcodiego]

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]

You mean decompiled code? Reverse engineered code is just code that someone wrote to match the existing functionality of something else.

[marcodiego]

Yeah, right. I mixed up things. Clean-room reverse engineering is, AFAIK, legal.