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The WinRAR approach

basicappleguy.com

125 pointsfrizlab103 comments

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).

KeepassXC nags me once a year to donate on the dude's birthday. DDU, WizTree, and Sublime also nag. And ShareX. I've donated to most of them now that I'm not broke. I only hope that other users do too so that the creators can be nicely compensated for their efforts.

I kinda like sublime's approach. It only asks when I repeatedly spam ctrl+s to save the file. But never on the first save. Only when I spam it five or so times.

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

The Renoise DAW does that as well, except for two or three features that are disabled in the trial version (nothing too vital or that could not be worked around by anyone interested in not paying iirc). Just an offline serial number to unlock, good for an entire major version of upgrades (some 10+ years in practice, it seems).

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.

> 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.

Pirates manage to work around this just fine, for a lot of programs.

> 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.

Arguably the same is true for WinRAR. Nowadays is .zip or .7z, but .rar was very common for a long time, and wouldn't have been if WinRAR wasn't available for effectively free.

Rar is still common to this day for the same reason since the beginning: The scene standardized around rar in the 90s (after arj).

https://scenerules.org/

That's mostly because it allows files to be split up in parts, and as such making incremental transfers easier in case a connection is lost, right?

Incremental, as in, could be easily split accross several floppies.

These tools got famous in the scene before Internet was widespread.

But 7zip (the app) opens .rar files. How does that work? Does WinRAR not own the file format?

They do and as far as I know you cannot make a rar file without WinRaR or some other authorized software

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR_(file_format)

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.

5 sec delay would be fine for today's standard, where all app takes much longer to load

I still use PSP 4.1 on win10/11 after 30 years... loads in <1 second and does 99% of what I need in an image editor (barely took more than a couple seconds to load even 30 years ago on regular hardware)

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...

I still use PSP 7. Not for anything serious or photo editing, but it's super fast and easy for anything simple like screenshot pasting and cropping. Although it doesn't handle a transparency channel well. For anything that needs that, I switch to Paint.net (and in truth Paint.net probably is superior overall, I just haven't bothered retraining my muscle memory to that rather than PSP.)

I got the same version back in the day (the company was still JASC and not Corel). Installers with the same try-before-you-buy wrapper in later editions did stop working as expected at the end of the trial period.

Someone mentioning it here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17653051

PSP eventually got sold to some for-profit company [sic]

Corel, it was Corel that bought them.

Sublime Text is another one. I paid for it, back when I used it, but everyone else I worked with simply dismissed the message after every n saves.

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.

> 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.

On the consumer side it's definitely global, but on the productive side it's somewhat unique. Eastern Europe had an odd combination of having a lot of cracked programmers and scientific culture combined with really crappy economics, so you had a lot of illicit, hacky solutions at a surprisingly high and professional level. Take Sci-Hub for example. That you have a Soviet Kazakh girl who had been coding from ten years old start a platform like this because she was broke and it's still going is a very stereotypical EE story.

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.

I'm rooting for Bulgaria then :-)

Also for Alexandra Elbakyan of course:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan

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.

I prefer to buy books than software, especially from T3X (Zenlisp, T3XForth, Klong...) and the Eforth+Subleq guy. The software it's libre licensed but the knowledge isn't, even if I have the documents right here, a good book to introduce me on K/Klang it's invaluable.

I'm confused - are you upset that people offer free alternatives to software, or that people opt to choose those, or that people share links to those?

I am upset people about the attitude in general, especially when they feel entitled to get a salary and are pretty much capable of owning expensive fruity hardware.

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.

Piracy is one of the things that made Windows the dominant OS. I: Linux is free, a friend: so is also Windows

It's different from HN, because back than e.g. a license of Visual Studio could easily cost as much as an annual income of a person in some/many countries.

It still does, yet I don't advocate for piracy.

I advocate for regional pricing.

And Western European too. Just ask about Italy, Spain, France in the 90's...

Companies did for working environments, with big software from AutoCAD and such, but no one paid it for learning purposes.

> And Western European too. Just ask about Italy, Spain, France in the 90's...

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.

> And Sweden

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.

Not that I'm aware of, but I also grew up in the 90s on a island with 700 inhabitants, so not exactly a good representation :) We were mostly sharing stuff once a quarter on LAN parties.

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

In Portugual yes, you could easily find shops close by to universtities with folders containing endless lists of software, it was a matter to place your order and come back to pick up it later on.

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.

In the East, even businesses and governments used to run on such copies. Microsoft conveniently closed eyes, otherwise nobody would use Windows, Office or any other software from them.

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.

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.

This is my favourite model. Provides a recommended price but doesn't lock out those who can't afford it. It also means you can try it as long as you want at your own pace. And most importantly the software is fully open source and free!

I would much rather pay for free software than proprietary addons to open-core software.

Proud Immich Server license holder.

(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.

"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.

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.

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.

> About lzma, I believe zst beats it on every metric

Performance, yes. But not compression. lzma compresses much smaller than zstd.

In default settings ZSTD favors speed. In max settings they are often about the same in both compression and speed e.g. https://dwaves.de/2023/10/16/gnu-linux-bash-maximum-best-com...

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.

7z has recently started supporting zstd compression, so you can compress much faster (though not as much).

Which version added the ZSTD compression? I think decompression was 24.01

I know that Peazip can compress 7z archives with zstd.

https://peazip.github.io/

I can't recall the last time I saw a .rar in the wild. Probably would have been at the end of my teenage piracy years, between windows 7 and 8.

But I don’t think this is actually the WinRAR approach, which I think is much more about getting money from companies whose compliance, legal, licensing, etc. cannot tolerate the idea that they’re technically violating a license like that.

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?

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)

Ha that messenger bag is great

I don't understand why companies pay for those licenses -- what are the use cases where you have to use WinRAR instead of 7-Zip or something else?

I've encountered at least a couple of 'it's free/Russian/doesn't have support' explanations from people on the web.

WinRAR compression winow is more ergonomic for certain workflows

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

I worked for a large-ish software company that had paid for a WinRAR license once upon a time, and that AFAIK still uses WinRAR for certain mission-critical tasks to this day. We often joked that we were the only people who had ever actually paid for a legitimate copy of WinRAR - although sounds like we were far from alone!

Protip: there are some kickass WinRAR themes out there.

https://www.rarlab.com/themes.htm

There was a WinRAR beer from a Brazilian brewery: https://untappd.com/b/cervejaria-cosme-winrar-session-ipa/28...

Great for the Open Sauce BBQ party!

I thought this was going to discuss how WinRAR remains a tiny executable, single-digit MB, in an age of bloat.

Still a good post, but not what I thought it would be.

Isn't the WinRAR approach more that you pay to avoid having to press "OK" to a dialog everytime the application starts?

aka "Nagware" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareware#Nagware

WinRAR is one of the tools what I'm missing a lot since I've moved to MacOS. The other one is Total Commander...

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

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

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...

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/.

Have you tried Ant Commander Pro file manager?

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.

As a teen coming up in the industry I always said I’d pay for WinRAR once I “made it”.

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.

> 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.

It's like, the most unobtrusive popup ever. Hit escape and it's gone.

> Hit escape and it's gone.

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

I think the real infamy comes from the fact that it says that it's a 40-day trial, but in reality it doesn't have a time limit and it's not enforced in any way. Similarly, you can make e.g. wallpapers with a Buy button, but if you're willing to spend just a bit extra effort you can get them for free, even if it's not completely obvious initially

LGR covered this extensively https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7W6hv4kcvg

I follow similar principal for https://Watermark.ink Almost every feature on watermark.ink site is free.

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

Pulumi is sorta like this, very generous free tier, so DevOps fall in love with it easily.

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).

Looks like one (or perhaps all) of the following is true:

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.

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