How exactly does winrar profit without a major loss with their current business plan?
In: 14
While you can use it without a license in perpetuity without the application breaking, businesses can’t. They are at a huge legal risk for using software against the license.
WinRAR lets people use it at home without refreshing the license in hopes that they end up using it at work, using a license there.
Software for corporations = big bucks
While everyone uses the personal “trial” for winrar, companies need to actually get a corporate license, otherwise they could be in big trouble. These corporate licenses can be expensive and so make winrar a decent amount of money.
Along with other points here, WinRar owns the patent for the RAR file format and ~~encryption~~ compression method. They sell this license to other companies like 7zip who allow their programs to decompress rar files.
Thank you everyone for enlightening me
To add to what has been said: There is absolutely zero reason to use winrar or the *.rar format these days. Use 7zip and zip files. The compression is identical for all intents and purposes, and there is no reason to use a copyrighted data format in this case.
Edit: [Here’s a benchmark comparing the available formats](https://peazip.github.io/peazip-compression-benchmark.html)
[removed]
Large companies also buy WinRAR and they can’t use it without buying license. We use it in our company too.
I’m assuming they are no longer banking on RAR becoming (more) successful. Basic zip is good enough for basic file compression, and for actual high performance compression, we already have multiple generations of better, content aware compression algorithms. (Oodle, Kraken, LZ4 etc)
Latest Answers