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The WinRAR approach

basicappleguy.com

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Re: The WinRAR approach

#5

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?

[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.

Re: The WinRAR approach

#7

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.

Re: The WinRAR approach

#8
(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.

Re: The WinRAR approach

#9

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

Re: The WinRAR approach

#10

(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

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