Unarchiver Provides LGPL RARv3 Extraction Tool

An anonymous reader writes "Free software to support the RARv3 archive format has been listed on the FSF's High Priority Projects list for some time now. We've always had ways to create and extract free archive formats, using tools like GNU tar and Info-ZIP. The RARv3 format is proprietary, so we don't want it to replace these tools, but it's not uncommon to see it used for distributing multimedia files over the Internet. That means the lack of free software to extract RARv3 files has been sorely felt. We're happy to share the news that there's now a free software project to fill this gap, and we can mark this item as done. The Unarchiver is a small collection of software written by Dag Ågren."

Comments

Seems like the distributor needs to be slapped

[wagnerrp]

Why would you use a proprietary format to store openly distributed files?

Re:Yay piracy!

[retchdog]

in unix, yes. in the windows world, there's only two levels of difficulty: drag-and-drop or impossible. most users have winzip or 7zip or whatever and pirates have traditionally favored rar. thus, the rar standard emerges and metastasizes so that programs like vlc support it natively. kind of silly, but it works.

if you want to cry, follow this link and count the number of shitty gui hacks that do nothing but "split" and "cat": http://www.google.com/search?q=split+file+windows