1) the company too small to attract a lawsuit, and nobody cares 2) the company does not have decent IT training 3) the company does not have a competent IT department
At the place where I work, we have been told clearly that we are not supposed to install third-party software without approval, and if we did that and specifically used the software in a way that violates ToS, we'll get a serious chat as soon as IT finds out.
It's surprising that anyone still cares about the rar file format. lzma, as used in .7z, has superior compression, and neither are particularly fast so it's not about performance.
7-Zip is BSD licensed and has a native Windows UI.
Granted it doesn’t have compression advantage over 7z, but those flags and features look great when I want to create archives, generally better and more convenient than anything else I look at, but I usually end up going with plain old zip files since various utilities can scan and search through them, etc., a network effect win for the zip format. But it also underscores that the best compression ratio doesn’t count for that much for me and some other people
Not a scientific benchmark, but I think it underlines general point. If I want the best results I use a .tar.xz at insane compression levels, or more commonly a .tar.zstd if I want good decompression speed. The usecase for 7zip and WinRar is convenience, ease of use and windows-native file handling instead of the unix-focused .tar format. WinRar wins out on all three of those.
7zip's gui is a worse clone of WinRar's, archive creation has a fraction of the features, windows-specific file handling is an afterthought at best (winrar has handling for the archive flag, alternate data streams, file security, hard links, etc). And most important of all rar is built as an archive format. You get built-in recovery records, and hashes are stored as blake2 hashes instead of the frankly insufficient crc32 hashes 7zip uses.
I'd give 7zip points if it had a better (== more familiar) CLI, but they made the bizarre decision to copy winrar's cli too and make even worse documentation for it. The only things it has going for it are a linux UI and the open-source license
About lzma, I believe zst beats it on every metric. I resisted it for a while, because it's tainted by Facebook, but I can't argue with the results.
Performance, yes. But not compression. lzma compresses much smaller than zstd.
There was a particularly good benchmark comparison of the two which put them on a Pareto front of speed vs size from different levels over each on some different sources but I can't find that. ZSTD was ahead most of the time.
I remember Paint Shop Pro being even more famous for this. I certainly got to day five hundred and something of the 30 day trial. I seem to remember an interview with the creator where he was grateful even to users that didn't pay because they helped sort knowledge of it. Sadly, I think later versions made it a harder limit.
Same for Windows throughout its history, at least for home use. But unlike WinRAR, Windows didn't run on goodwill. MS understood the power of market share and network effects. The staying power of Windows in the enterprise comes from every new hire being familiar with Windows, its concepts, maybe even the tooling. The home user gets its dose for free because the enterprise user (and other shady deals) pays enough to cover for that.
These tools got famous in the scene before Internet was widespread.
Another, more current, example is the audio workstation Reaper. After the generous 60-day trial it keeps showing a message about it on every startup that cannot be dismissed for 5 seconds or so, but otherwise remains fully functional.
It’s great and one should totally buy it, of course. Doesn’t break the bank either.
for the remaining 1% of the time, the image editor in sharex does what I need at least for screenshots and rarely I need to use paint.net for something more nuanced...
Someone mentioning it here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17653051
Isn't that more of the global culture? I mean, ok, not in business environments, but for most people around the world? Only a small fraction of people can afford buying software to any significant extent.
Places in the USSR or adjacent Soviet sphere, like Bulgaria, which had a very strong computer industry and technical culture but also were isolated from the West had this weird combination of high tech, communist or academic ethos and improvised solutions, that didn't really happen in a lot of other places. Probably accounts for the concentration of pretty sophisticated cybercrime in the region these days too.
Also for Alexandra Elbakyan of course:
Because why pay for the work of others, when only we matter.
As someone from southern Europe, where there was hardly any original software being sold during 1980's and 1990's, one thing I gladly do today is to pay for the tools I use in production.
Be it via donations, buying books from key people on the ecosystem, or actually getting a licence.
Then every couple of months later everyone is complaining there is no money in FOSS, that there are too many subscription fatigue, walled guardens and what not.
Of course they are, there is no other way to make money from trying to sell software if it doesn't come with a ball and chain, apparently.
Companies did for working environments, with big software from AutoCAD and such, but no one paid it for learning purposes.
And Sweden and... I'm starting to think this was worldwide, or at least "anywhere-outside-the-US". Many memories of me and friends hanging out on DC++, using cracked applications wherever we could, and most people around me did the same too.
Did you guys have dedicated open-air markets selling CDs with "software collections", "Windows essentials", "The best of Adobe" for $2 ... ? I remember visiting one in Moscow and it was wild. Every piece of software, including like Oracle and SAP ... lol. All for peanuts.
But I do remember visiting either Turkey or Bulgaria in the early 2000s with my mom, and coming across one of those markets, and had a blast buying cracked C&C Generals for dirt cheap, together with a bunch of PS2 games I couldn't actually run on my non-cracked PS2 :D
During the 8 bit days all tapes were clearly copied, many of them even had B&W copies of the instructions, clearly cutted out with scissors.
However this is all gone, after our involvement into EU all these kind of stuff started to be cracked down.
It is still around if you look for it, e.g. cracked game consoles and cable TV boxes, but it will be clearly taken care of if found by authorities.
I just bought it yesterday :D
BetterZip also comes with a Quick Look plugin.
> The other one is Total Commander...
Maybe check out Transmit by Panic. It's technically a remote file transfer software, but can also be used for the local filesystem.
Re TC: I am using CommanderOne, that one gets close to it. Also using Midnight Commander in the Terminal
Though over time i switched to using Double Commander, an open source Total Commander clone written in Lazarus / Free Pascal, more than Total Commander itself since it runs natively on Linux and can do things like running programs such as xterm, but i still keep Total Commander installed since it can do some things better (or at least in a more familiar manner).
My default archiver is still WinRAR though.
There's also a free version with a few features restricted here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/commander-one-file-manager/id1...
No, it did not. It ran on annoyance. If you wanted to avoid having to dismiss the "30-day trial" dialog on startup, you needed to pay. And some people paid. I'm not saying that it was immoral, it was just... annoying. Plus, for most (?) of WinRAR's existence, you could really do very well with alternatives such as the 7zip utility - www.7-zip.org , that was perfectly free-as-in-beer.
People back then were really primitive. They never new of "remind me later" or "if you don't (install updates) buy this software you (will lose the ability to make legal claims) need to press ok". /s
Everyone else in the industry uses online activation. Whenever they take those servers down you lose your ability to install and use the software you bought.
With programs like WinRar and Reaper, even if the company producing it disappears tomorrow and takes all their servers with them, you can continue to make full use of the software you bought in 'free trial' mode and that is huge.
I like to think the developer specifically targetted this "redundant consecutive save" behavior knowing many users do this.
But it's probably more like "every X saves, only after Y time period since last nag", which only coincidentally triggers for me when I spam the save shortcut
Otherwise, at least 5+ years ago when I kept up with this, music software without annoying drm was extremely rare, seemingly worse than any other type of software I encountered, yet almost everyone (unsurprisingly) seems to use pirated versions. A sad side-effect is that cheaper alternatives like Reaper or Reason (or any free software) are not as widespread as you would expect, since most prefer to just use a pirated $2000+ application.
Pirates manage to work around this just fine, for a lot of programs.
I think that this model is a great indicator that the software/content distributed is of high quality. Because no user will purchase this before even using it, but only after they form a opinion that it deserves the financial support.
I would much rather pay for free software than proprietary addons to open-core software.
Proud Immich Server license holder.
Still a good post, but not what I thought it would be.
Happy to say I’ve paid for more than a few copies for myself and friends! It’s the small little things like this that make the grind worth it to me.
Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.
IncreasePosts•8mo ago
fortran77•8mo ago
https://x.com/WinRAR_RARLAB/status/1703723906945691890
Most of their revenue comes from corporate licenses.
badsectoracula•8mo ago
[0] https://in.tern.et/collections/winrar (linked by the official twitter)
thenthenthen•8mo ago
rs186•8mo ago
justsomehnguy•8mo ago
SSLy•8mo ago
from_endor•8mo ago
[1] https://www.northdata.com
jaza•8mo ago