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The WinRAR approach

basicappleguy.com

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Re: The WinRAR approach

#41

Post by jwitthuhn »

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.

Re: The WinRAR approach

#43

Post by Daviey »

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.

Re: The WinRAR approach

#45

Post by encom »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #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.

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.

Re: The WinRAR approach

#46

Post by whyoh »

wongarsu wrote: post #16
LeoPanthera wrote: post #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.

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 Win…

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.

Re: The WinRAR approach

#47

Post by mystifyingpoi »

jwitthuhn wrote: post #41

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 wi…

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).

Re: The WinRAR approach

#48

Post by aerzen »

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.

Re: The WinRAR approach

#49

Post by rzzzt »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #15

> 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 becau…

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

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