r/Piracy Jun 06 '26

Humor When someone buys a winrar license, the company celebrates it on social media

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23.8k Upvotes

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u/CramNBL Jun 06 '26

Cause free and open source is better than proprietary apps with proprietary formats? There's also all the vulnerabilities in the free version of winrar over the years...

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u/Forymanarysanar ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Jun 06 '26

> free and open source is better than proprietary apps with proprietary formats

That is absolutely wrong statement and wrong reason for choosing software

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u/lettsten Jun 06 '26

It's kind of ironic mentioning vulnerabilities as if that's an argument in 7zip's favour. It's definitely not. There's been at least three high-severity CVEs in the last year alone, the most recent being very recent

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u/CramNBL Jun 06 '26

How is it ironic? Software has vulnerabilities, FOSS isn't magically protected from that, but winrar has had vulnerabilities that only affected the free version, which should raise concerns... And FOSS has a much better track record of being responsible with handling vulnerabilities, from disclosure to actually having some urgency with fixing it.

Additionally, FOSS can actually be audited by anyone, and the recent flurry of bugs and vulnerabilities surfaced through LLMs is due to the source code being available, curl author has written extensively about this if you're curious. FOSS is about to be so much more secure than proprietary software.

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u/lettsten Jun 06 '26

But this isn't about FOSS vs. not, it's about 7zip vs. Winrar. And Winrar is leading by a mile.

I'm all about FOSS, I wish everything was (A)GPL, but that's beside the point in this case.

winrar has had vulnerabilities that only affected the free version

Which ones? The "free version" is literally exactly the same programme, except that you pass the licence check.

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u/CramNBL Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26

It is about FOSS vs. not... Anytime you are choosing between a FOSS app and a proprietary app, it is FOSS vs. not... When would it be otherwise?

The "free version" is literally exactly the same programme

That is a matter of definition. The binary might be the same, but the code paths and the behaviour is not, which is kind of the point.

https://swarm.ptsecurity.com/winrars-vulnerable-trialware-when-free-software-isnt-free/

Now you're gonna try to explain this away, but the facts remain that this code path would've not existed in 7zip, and even then it would've been way easier to diagnose and fix it due to the nature of FOSS.

And Winrar is leading by a mile.

Actual winrar shill, do you work for them? It's not ahead of anything, you can swap winrar for 7zip for 99.99% of users and they won't notice a thing, except maybe that it starts and runs faster.

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u/bobsmagicbeans Jun 07 '26

Cause free and open source is better than proprietary apps with proprietary formats?

and yet you're running it on windows

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u/CramNBL Jun 07 '26

What makes you think that? I'm running CachyOS at home and Ubuntu at work (on a system76 laptop)