this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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WinRAR was great for the time and their policies on paying for the program were extremely generous. Time just overtook it.
It's essentially just shareware.
More specifically, it's nagware which wasn't particularly uncommon for the time WinRAR was introduced so I don't know that it's particularly generous really when one considers all the other nagware that came out in the late 90s.
It's just one of many different licensing strategies.
In this case it seems to have paid off for the developer as it appears to have resulted in a great deal of fondness and goodwill among a certain portion of the user base.
It was never great.
Their "generous" pay if you want to remove this obnoxious message prompt aside...
It was temporarily useful until better alternatives arose... Which took virtually no time.
Back in the day WIndows didn't even have the capability to deal with ZIPs natively. Even if its time was brief (which I honestly don't remember, I think that it was useful for years, almost up to Vista's time) it was useful.
And I do think it generous that this paid software just let you use it after clicking a button with no time limit. Time gave us better options, but I think a lot of people look at WinRAR harsher than it deserves.
This revisionist history is so wild I can only assume you are 16 years old and freshly playing on your first computer that you dont need to share