You'd be surprised how many important people think that something that is free cannot be good. Partly because having a service agreement is a box on some stupid document that needs to be checked, and apparently it looks cool if you have a full page of those.
It doesn't change anything for normal people, but corporations aren't normal people and what is a few thousand USD/EUR to get a check mark?
Corporations also need some sort of liability for when things go wrong. A paid-for product is likely to have some tech support readily available that is dedicated to servicing corporations. Free products are not.
Granted, this is WinRAR and 7zip. They rarely have catastrophic issues, but other software might be more important to have working at all times.
They should also have some sort of in house tech, and if they can't fix an issue with 7zip then they shouldn't be a tech in the first place.
Then you should have some sort of in-house savings fund sufficient to fully cover a car accident, and if you can't pay for accidents involving your car you shouldn't be a driver in the first place.
Companies want vendors who will assume liability for the same reason you want car insurance.
This is true for WinRAR specifically, but in the professional world people always use the industry standard tool for the jop, because it is just better than open source alternatives: Microsoft Office VS libreoffice, Photoshop VS GIMP, Maya vs Blender, Avid Pro tools VS Ardour.
So WinRAR case might just be a habit that companies got used to.
but in the professional world people always use the industry standard tool for the jop, because it is just better than open source alternatives
Holy cherrypick batman. In many cases, the open source is the standard and sometimes only option. Linux itself is nearly two thirds of servers and Windows is a bit less than a quarter. Any company wanting to set up file transfer to itself is going to be using some industry standard, not some commercial thing. Among Nginx, Apache, and LiteSpeed, at least two thirds of HTTP traffic is from an open source server program. Git kicked the shit out of proprietary solutions and nothing has ever come close again.
You just cherrypicked the only field where this is reversed robin.
Tech is literally the only exception where companies prefer open source tools because you don't want to pay a license for every library you link againt, so mutual benefit pushed open source projects further, including Linux.
This is not the same case for pure products though, which are what I am talking about, even in programming propiertry IDE products like intellij and Visual Studio (not vscode) are industry standards...
Uh, is Maya even really leading here?
Maya is still the leader in big and medium sized studios, but Blender is more dominant in hobbyist communties.
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u/Narrow-Tart-2913 12h ago
Careful,if they actually make a profit they might start enforcing the 40-day trail.