Like any other organization NSA needs to attract talent and compete for it with US corporations. Releasing Ghidra as open source they solve multiple problems.
1. Show everyone in reverse engineering and cybersecurity community what cool toys NSA have to play with.
2. Make sure there is huge pool of talent trained to work with NSA tools.
3. Get countless contributions towards processors / architecture support, etc.
Chris Delikat presented iirc mostly practical reasons for open sourcing Ghidra, like interoperability with other agencies or non-government groups, at Black Hat 2019: https://youtu.be/kx2xp7IQNSc?t=1838
If the reasons presented were actually decisive can of course be questioned.
Okay I haven't seen this speech before. I guess we can actually trust the guy who worked at NSA at time to know their reason for releasing it. I mean Chris Delikat.
And yeah he does mention recruitment benefits on second slide.
Yep. The NSA was solving a universal problem (nobody wants to pay for IDA Pro licenses) and it makes more sense to pool their efforts with the community than to divide them. That, and it's also great PR. But mostly the first one, I reckon.
What worse before Ghidra was released it was actually damn hard to even buy IDA license and I not even sure if situation changed at all. I cant even imagine that someone can "secretly" buy an IDA license and it obvious thing that NSA would want to do.
I guess people who come up with conspiracy theories simply don't know that all around the world there might be like 10,000 good reverse engineering experts. Might be even less of them. It's very small talent pool and it does make sense for NSA to do everything to make hiring easier.
