The DAW Reaper also uses a similar approach and for that alone I would highly recommend anyone interested in audio production give it a try.
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.
Reaper does it really well. It's just a minor nag ("hey, you used Reaper for xx:xx hours, would you consider paying?") and a 5-second wait on startup (not on every startup even, I think on every system reboot or something).
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.
> If you're familiar with WinRAR, the Windows file compression tool, you'll know where this is going. WinRAR became infamous for offering a "30-day trial" that never actually expired.
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 MS-DOS, at least in the early years. Microsoft was completely aware just how often it was pirated, even by businesses, but just cared more about market share.
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.
I used to love PSP back in the day. Is it still any good? I don’t much like Affinity Photo and unfortunately Adobe is completely insufferable.
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.
It is not about goodwill; it is more about making laypersons familiar with the software so that corporate licenses can be sold. This has been a very much established BM for sharewares.
If anything, what we are getting is people trying to make a living from selling software, in post-FOSS realising the reasons of those licenses of yore, and to think twice when choosing a license.
Don't forget that WinRAR comes from 90s eastern European/xUSSR cultural background, where nobody paid for IP, for something that could be copied. Nobody would use it otherwise. I'm pretty sure even the authors used "pirated" copies of OS/compilers to produce WinRAR.
You mean like on HN, a site initially for startups, where every single time there is a post about some tool with payment, there are enough comments about free beer clones?
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.
> European/xUSSR cultural background, where nobody paid for IP, for something that could be copied
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.
I seem to remember Winzip did the same thing, long before windows natively supported Zip. It became an auto-reflex to hit "Continue" .. So much so that they responded by randomly swapping the Buy/Activate button and "Continue Trial" on each startup.
(I know this article isn't actually about rar, but...)
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.
WinRAR has a lot of great features as an archiver and compressor. It can create parity archives, and has a lot of other great features if you look at the manual
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
Well said. The ability to embed a recovery record for really important stuff and the command line support is enough for me to keep using Winrar forever.
The difference in compression isn't that big. Just ran a test on some random 1GB plain-text file I had lying around. Both on the highest compression level at a dictionary size that uses about 5.5GB of RAM to compress (since that's what 128MB dictionary size uses in 7zip, the Winrar equivalent are 916MB, more than what's useful for this file). The result was 7zip compressing the file down to 225MB in 9 minutes and WinRAR compressing it to 239MB in 2 minutes. That's a 6% difference, at a considerable speed cost.
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
Well, another advantage that 7-zip has is in the update mode (CLI); unlike WinRAR, it can handle deleted files as well. So it lets you make proper differential backups (snapshots of a folder, for instance), recreating the original state when restoring.
Im just now writing a MOBI parser, which are just Palm Database Format files effectively, and if that is any indication, I’m fairly sure PalmOS is very far from the best option available.
A few things. People care because RAR is ancient, and there are a lot of RAR-archives in the wild. And also WinRAR has resisted enshittification - it's a very well made piece of software that has had a mostly stable UI. It works, and works well, so why change?
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.
I had the same thought when i switched to Linux a few years ago - then i realized i can just run them under Wine :-P.
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).
What do you miss about WinRAR? The ability to view an archive's contents without having to extract it first, and extract individual files? That can be achieved with BetterZip:
> WinRAR became infamous for offering a "30-day trial" that never actually expired. Instead of cutting off access or locking features, it simply asked users to consider purchasing it if they found it useful. It ran on goodwill
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.
Does anyone have any estimates for how much money WinRAR has made over the years, and for whom? Is it just a one man shop, a big company with multiple developers, or what?
win.rar GmbH is a German corporation and as such is required to post their financial statements to the federal "Handelsregister". If you google the exact company name, you'll quickly find the Northdata site for them (Northdata is a crawler that aggregates Handelsregister data) [1]. According to that, they made ~1M€ in earnings in 2023.
I find it amusing that, of all things, WinRAR has a community manager and said community manager has fully embraced the meme culture - and there is even merchandise[0] for it.
This isn't some fact that is going to appear in the encyclopedia Brittanica. If you actually search for it, you'll find a bunch of content like "if you assume they sell 5 million copies per year at $10 per copy, then they must make $50M/year!!".
I won't say it's likely, but a number of times on this very forum I got the inside scoop by asking a question and having someone in the know respond directly to me. Off the top of my head, Patrick Collision and Walter Bright have filled me in on details that people otherwise just speculated about online.
Both of them probably lost some hard-to-quantify money when divulging such info, pricing obscurity is a tool many negotiators use, transparency kills such tools, of course when competition forces internal prices to be revealed the dynamics change but in general there is little to gain business wise.
Happens all the time. In the company I used to work at, everyone in the web development team used the obsidian editor. I mentioned multiple times that I don't think it's free for commercial use, no one even bat an eye. I feel like people just don't care, especially if they don't have a stake in the company (which is very understandable but imo still not reasonable).
The DAW Reaper also uses a similar approach and for that alone I would highly recommend anyone interested in audio production give it a try.
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.
Reaper does it really well. It's just a minor nag ("hey, you used Reaper for xx:xx hours, would you consider paying?") and a 5-second wait on startup (not on every startup even, I think on every system reboot or something).
Immich recently introduced a similar pricing model - you can buy a license, but there are no major features locked if you don't.
https://buy.immich.app/
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.
> If you're familiar with WinRAR, the Windows file compression tool, you'll know where this is going. WinRAR became infamous for offering a "30-day trial" that never actually expired.
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 MS-DOS, at least in the early years. Microsoft was completely aware just how often it was pirated, even by businesses, but just cared more about market share.
> Same for MS-DOS, at least in the early years
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.
I used to love PSP back in the day. Is it still any good? I don’t much like Affinity Photo and unfortunately Adobe is completely insufferable.
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.
I follow similar principal for https://Watermark.ink Almost every feature on watermark.ink site is free.
It is not about goodwill; it is more about making laypersons familiar with the software so that corporate licenses can be sold. This has been a very much established BM for sharewares.
If anything, what we are getting is people trying to make a living from selling software, in post-FOSS realising the reasons of those licenses of yore, and to think twice when choosing a license.
Don't forget that WinRAR comes from 90s eastern European/xUSSR cultural background, where nobody paid for IP, for something that could be copied. Nobody would use it otherwise. I'm pretty sure even the authors used "pirated" copies of OS/compilers to produce WinRAR.
You mean like on HN, a site initially for startups, where every single time there is a post about some tool with payment, there are enough comments about free beer clones?
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.
> European/xUSSR cultural background, where nobody paid for IP, for something that could be copied
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.
I seem to remember Winzip did the same thing, long before windows natively supported Zip. It became an auto-reflex to hit "Continue" .. So much so that they responded by randomly swapping the Buy/Activate button and "Continue Trial" on each startup.
Isn't the WinRAR approach more that you pay to avoid having to press "OK" to a dialog everytime the application starts?
(I know this article isn't actually about rar, but...)
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.
WinRAR has a lot of great features as an archiver and compressor. It can create parity archives, and has a lot of other great features if you look at the manual
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
Well said. The ability to embed a recovery record for really important stuff and the command line support is enough for me to keep using Winrar forever.
The difference in compression isn't that big. Just ran a test on some random 1GB plain-text file I had lying around. Both on the highest compression level at a dictionary size that uses about 5.5GB of RAM to compress (since that's what 128MB dictionary size uses in 7zip, the Winrar equivalent are 916MB, more than what's useful for this file). The result was 7zip compressing the file down to 225MB in 9 minutes and WinRAR compressing it to 239MB in 2 minutes. That's a 6% difference, at a considerable speed cost.
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
Well, another advantage that 7-zip has is in the update mode (CLI); unlike WinRAR, it can handle deleted files as well. So it lets you make proper differential backups (snapshots of a folder, for instance), recreating the original state when restoring.
"Best" doesn't always win. We'd be sporting PalmOS if that were the case.
Im just now writing a MOBI parser, which are just Palm Database Format files effectively, and if that is any indication, I’m fairly sure PalmOS is very far from the best option available.
A few things. People care because RAR is ancient, and there are a lot of RAR-archives in the wild. And also WinRAR has resisted enshittification - it's a very well made piece of software that has had a mostly stable UI. It works, and works well, so why change?
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.
LGR covered this extensively https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7W6hv4kcvg
WinRAR is one of the tools what I'm missing a lot since I've moved to MacOS. The other one is Total Commander...
I use Commander One (https://commander-one.com/) on MacOS as a Total Commander replacement and it's good enough.
There's also a free version with a few features restricted here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/commander-one-file-manager/id1...
I had the same thought when i switched to Linux a few years ago - then i realized i can just run them under Wine :-P.
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.
Yeah, DoubleCommander is almost like TC. I'll look into Vine on MacOS
It's been years since I used Total Commander, so I don't recall all its features anymore. On macOS I use Marta https://marta.sh/.
What do you miss about WinRAR? The ability to view an archive's contents without having to extract it first, and extract individual files? That can be achieved with BetterZip:
https://macitbetter.com
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.
https://panic.com/transmit
Cool, I was not aware of BetterZip, looks great!
Re TC: I am using CommanderOne, that one gets close to it. Also using Midnight Commander in the Terminal
Huh, CommanderOne is new to me. Thanks
This basically worked for me as well, forklift on macOS has basically an infinite trial but will constantly ask you to buy it
I just bought it yesterday :D
> WinRAR became infamous for offering a "30-day trial" that never actually expired. Instead of cutting off access or locking features, it simply asked users to consider purchasing it if they found it useful. It ran on goodwill
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.
Protip: there are some kickass WinRAR themes out there.
https://www.rarlab.com/themes.htm
Does anyone have any estimates for how much money WinRAR has made over the years, and for whom? Is it just a one man shop, a big company with multiple developers, or what?
win.rar GmbH is a German corporation and as such is required to post their financial statements to the federal "Handelsregister". If you google the exact company name, you'll quickly find the Northdata site for them (Northdata is a crawler that aggregates Handelsregister data) [1]. According to that, they made ~1M€ in earnings in 2023.
[1] https://www.northdata.com
There are some clues:
https://x.com/WinRAR_RARLAB/status/1703723906945691890
Most of their revenue comes from corporate licenses.
I find it amusing that, of all things, WinRAR has a community manager and said community manager has fully embraced the meme culture - and there is even merchandise[0] for it.
[0] https://in.tern.et/collections/winrar (linked by the official twitter)
[flagged]
This isn't some fact that is going to appear in the encyclopedia Brittanica. If you actually search for it, you'll find a bunch of content like "if you assume they sell 5 million copies per year at $10 per copy, then they must make $50M/year!!".
I won't say it's likely, but a number of times on this very forum I got the inside scoop by asking a question and having someone in the know respond directly to me. Off the top of my head, Patrick Collision and Walter Bright have filled me in on details that people otherwise just speculated about online.
Both of them probably lost some hard-to-quantify money when divulging such info, pricing obscurity is a tool many negotiators use, transparency kills such tools, of course when competition forces internal prices to be revealed the dynamics change but in general there is little to gain business wise.
[flagged]
Well enough according to their recent financial disclosures.
My company doesn't even pay for WinRAR. Their approach is pretty awful, haha.
If you use it or have it installed after 30 days without a buying, your company has violated the terms of the license.
Happens all the time. In the company I used to work at, everyone in the web development team used the obsidian editor. I mentioned multiple times that I don't think it's free for commercial use, no one even bat an eye. I feel like people just don't care, especially if they don't have a stake in the company (which is very understandable but imo still not reasonable).