81–90 of 110 posts
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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> 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.
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
> 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 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,…
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.
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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 t…
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There are some clues: https://x.com/WinRAR_RARLAB/status/1703723906945691890 Most of their revenue comes from corporate licenses.
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?
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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.…
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?
> 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's like, the most unobtrusive popup ever. 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 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.
Performance, yes. But not compression. lzma compresses much smaller than zstd.