[HN Gopher] The WinRAR approach
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The WinRAR approach
Author : frizlab
Score : 101 points
Date : 2025-05-21 05:38 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (basicappleguy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (basicappleguy.com)
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| 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?
| fortran77 wrote:
| There are some clues:
|
| https://x.com/WinRAR_RARLAB/status/1703723906945691890
|
| Most of their revenue comes from corporate licenses.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| 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)
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Ha that messenger bag is great
| rs186 wrote:
| 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?
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| I've encountered at least a couple of 'it's
| free/Russian/doesn't have support' explanations from people
| on the web.
| from_endor wrote:
| 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 ~1MEUR in earnings in 2023.
|
| [1] https://www.northdata.com
| jaza wrote:
| 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!
| bigmace wrote:
| My company doesn't even pay for WinRAR. Their approach is pretty
| awful, haha.
| buccal wrote:
| If you use it or have it installed after 30 days without a
| buying, your company has violated the terms of the license.
| sureglymop wrote:
| 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).
| rs186 wrote:
| 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.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| (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.
| theonemind wrote:
| 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
| UberFly wrote:
| 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.
| sureIy wrote:
| "Best" doesn't always win. We'd be sporting PalmOS if that were
| the case.
| 9dev wrote:
| 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.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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
| whyoh wrote:
| 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.
| encom wrote:
| 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.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| > About lzma, I believe zst beats it on every metric
|
| Performance, yes. But not compression. lzma compresses much
| smaller than zstd.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| 7z has recently started supporting zstd compression, so you can
| compress much faster (though not as much).
| mystified5016 wrote:
| 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.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| ed_mercer wrote:
| LGR covered this extensively
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7W6hv4kcvg
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| > 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.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| 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.
| buran77 wrote:
| > 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.
| dtech wrote:
| 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.
| 0points wrote:
| 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/
| wvbdmp wrote:
| 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.
| t_mahmood wrote:
| 5 sec delay would be fine for today's standard, where all app
| takes much longer to load
| emeril wrote:
| 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...
| vikingerik wrote:
| 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.)
| rzzzt wrote:
| 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
| 0points wrote:
| PSP eventually got sold to some for-profit company [sic]
| eps wrote:
| Corel, it was Corel that bought them.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Protip: there are some kickass WinRAR themes out there.
|
| https://www.rarlab.com/themes.htm
| rzzzt wrote:
| There was a WinRAR beer from a Brazilian brewery:
| https://untappd.com/b/cervejaria-cosme-winrar-session-ipa/28...
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Great for the Open Sauce BBQ party!
| zerr wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > _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.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| I'm rooting for Bulgaria then :-)
|
| Also for Alexandra Elbakyan of course:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| 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?
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| hulitu wrote:
| Piracy is one of the things that made Windows the dominant
| OS. I: Linux is free, a friend: so is also Windows
| zerr wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It still does, yet I don't advocate for piracy.
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| diggan wrote:
| > 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.
| eps wrote:
| > 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.
| diggan wrote:
| 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
| zerr wrote:
| 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.
| fuomag9 wrote:
| 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
| aquir wrote:
| WinRAR is one of the tools what I'm missing a lot since I've
| moved to MacOS. The other one is Total Commander...
| LoganDark wrote:
| 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
| aquir wrote:
| 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
| LoganDark wrote:
| Huh, CommanderOne is new to me. Thanks
| badsectoracula wrote:
| 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.
| aquir wrote:
| Yeah, DoubleCommander is almost like TC. I'll look into Vine
| on MacOS
| Tallain wrote:
| 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...
| O-stevns wrote:
| 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/.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > _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.
| squigz wrote:
| It's like, the most unobtrusive popup ever. Hit escape and it's
| gone.
| hulitu wrote:
| > 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
| jwitthuhn wrote:
| 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.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| 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).
| 3036e4 wrote:
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| > 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.
| TowerTall wrote:
| Isn't the WinRAR approach more that you pay to avoid having to
| press "OK" to a dialog everytime the application starts?
| thisislife2 wrote:
| aka "Nagware" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareware#Nagware
| Daviey wrote:
| 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.
| tealpod wrote:
| I follow similar principal for https://Watermark.ink Almost every
| feature on watermark.ink site is free.
| aerzen wrote:
| 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.
| kevincox wrote:
| 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.
| sgarland wrote:
| 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.
| phil21 wrote:
| 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.
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