• Obinice@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    52
    arrow-down
    28
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I agree that 7zip is great (albeit based in Russia, so not something I’m sure I want to support at the moment), but consider for a moment that winrar licencing is primarily aimed at businesses (which is why they don’t bother locking personal users out after the trial ends), and for that money you get a certain guarantee of functionality and stability over a long period of time.

    There’s absolutely no guarantees that 7zip will continue to be developed, or that it will retain it’s current features and functionality - the developer can turn it into a Minesweeper clone if they feel like it, and there’s nothing a business can do but keep using an outdated and thus potentially dangerous version that will eventually become unusable.

    You also get a certain level of customer service and corporate communication between the purchasing company and the production company to help resolve issues, which may not exist at all with the alternative.

    It’s also not always wise to have your business rely heavily on a tool that only sees development through volunteer work by a limited number of disparate people that may come and go, and while I don’t know how large the volunteer base is that works on 7zip (it could be just the one guy, it could be a hundred people), to a company it’ll never feel as reliable an option as relying on a tool that sees development and maintenance through a paid, full time staff at an established legal entity company with an established reputation.

    And speaking for a moment to that established company bit, consider that winrar’s company is based in Berlin, within the European Union and under it’s rules and laws, which is a far better proposition from a company’s standpoint than having to legally deal with an individual guy inside the Russian Federation, especially one that hasn’t actually sold your business a product at all.

    Anyway, just a few potential thoughts for why tools that do the same job might be preferred by a business, sorry it got a bit long 😅

    • Rolder@reddthat.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      39
      ·
      1 year ago

      I mean, does paying for winrar somehow guarantee that it will keep being actively developed?

      • sethboy66@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        9
        arrow-down
        8
        ·
        1 year ago

        No, the fact that businesses pay for it for something of that guarantee despite there being free peer-alternatives means that it is a better guarantee.

        When you see businesses electing to pay for something despite free alternatives, there is likely a reason (or a number of them). I’ve seen free tools go from active maintaining to completely dead in a single update due to the work needed to get it back up and operating with new environment-side changes.

        • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          1 year ago

          I’ve seen free tools go from active maintaining to completely dead in a single update

          And we’ve all seen companies go out of business overnight. There’s no more guarantee that WinRAR will still be around tomorrow than there is for 7z.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      37
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      7zip is FOSS, GPL license. Even if the author stops others can step in. Even if nobody does and it stops being actively developed you’ll still be able to extract your archives for the foreseeable future. You can still unpack ARC files from the 80s.

    • SaraIsabella@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      1 year ago

      Just because someone was born in Russia does not make them a specific type of person. Nobody chooses where or when they are born. 7-Zip has been for ages, and if something were to happen to it then im sure one of the dozen of forks around will take the role as the “main one”. However you are right, companies desire something predictable, stable. Which is why some companies like SUSE, Red Hat, etc. Manage to sell FOSS. in fact i believe some of these distros include p7zip, and they freeze it to a specific version, security updates and bug fixes are backported.

          • kbotc@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            … You can’t edit files inside a zip file. The program’s just hiding that it’s decompressing and decompressing the whole thing every time you change something.

            Zip files are usually just another wrapper around DEFLATE, and compressing each block requires knowledge of the previous block’s compression (Part of LZ77). It’s a streaming format, not a sparse format.

              • kbotc@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                RAR != ZIP.

                Fell free to read a stack overflow about that situation

                Your choices are basically “rewrite the entire file” or “leave the original file in place, do an append and try and hide the old file.”

                Editing old data in most streaming file formats with inline metadata is basically impossible because they compact the data as much as possible and internally refer to offsets.

                Appending is trivial, editing is very hard if not downright impossible.

            • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              If you edit a text file, it actually just creates a new file because inserting text in the middle means all of the text after changes position. I’d still call that editing an existing file rather than creating a new file based on the previous one plus some edits. The second description might be more technically accurate but it’s just unnecessary technical details because it’s effectively the first description.

              Even going back to the original use of edit, editors would mark up books or articles and then a new copy would need to be created with those edits. I’m having trouble thinking of any cases where edit truly means “change something in place without making a new copy of it with the changes included”. I guess small edits with pencil or whiteout can sometimes work.