Did WinRar ever try to break a union
Only into a mutlipart rar file.
… like WikiMedia Foundation has. (to be clear)
Kinda pointless to unionize when it’s run by two brothers and there are, as far as I know, no other employees.
Wikimedia Foundation has 650 enployees as of 2025.
One chance to guess where I got this from
You went to your local library and read the 2026 lexicon?
Honestly didn’t stop me from donating, ultimately no one was fired and while it does sound scummy I have yet to see an alternative to Wikipedia that isn’t run by grifters or looneys.
ultimately no one was fired
Except for Brooke Vibber and other union organizers.
People who buy WinRar should consult with psychiatrist about their medication. WinRar is obsolete. We have better open-source alternatives for a decade or even longer.
8zip is better because it’s one more.
7zip? Or is there a new one for me to check out.
What you recommend?
7 Zip
7-Zip
I’m gonna go against the grain here and recommend 7-zip
7zip
7zip is solid
7 Zip is good
7zip
7zip
7ziiiiip
Seven-Zip
7-up
7zip
7zip
7 ziP
7Zip
i think people will mostly say 7zip
Have you ever heard of 7zip?
7ZIP
xz-utils
There’s also the more modern and powerful zstd. Better than 7zip/xz and far more flexible.
I’ve heard from some people that 7zip is pretty good
7-Zip
7z
7zip
zip zip zip zip zip zip zip
7zip is good
7zip is good but the UI is shit.
xzcomes standard with every Linux distribution, and it implements the same 7zip compression algorithm but with more options.Sept-Zip /French
Hot take: 7Zip
7zip
7zip has been around for a couple decades now
this may be unpopular but I suggest 7-zip
7zip
Winzip
Nanazip
Ark is good too
This sign can’t stop me because I can’t read
Also no psychiatrist in a 300 mile radius accepts new patients
deleted by creator
You keep your hands off my ACE Archiver.
No way I would touch THAT, don’t worry :)
I did both in the past.
And promptly lost the RAR license.And not feeling so great about wikimedias recent organizational actions.
The world is complicated
It’s so crazy to me that a non profit is anti union. Like, I know we live in a capitalist dystopia but I guess I didn’t think it was that bad.
The issue with wikipedia goes more than this when the realisation hits that some pages are extremely biased with whole sections relying on a singular reference. Its a non profit alright, but it has its share of gatekeepers that lean on serving factually incorrect info or even commonly accepted but incorrect info.
WinRAR got what they needed. You did good.
Wikimedia… Hindsight is a bitch, you either live life not helping places that need it or take chances on helping people you don’t know are assholes.
TBF, organizational actions aside, they made a thing, it’s pretty damned useful, you can download the thing and keep it forever. I’ve donated to causes that have done less for me.
I didn’t donate this year
Donated to wiki. They proceeded to spam my inbox every other day begging for more.
Don’t. They had 180 million usd income, with operating cost of 3 million usd, and they currently have over quarter BILLION is net assets. They (Wiki foundation) are at the point where they become cancerous to the Wikipedia - e. g. they are currently union busting.
This is true of any non-profit you give to ever though
I donated to st Jude for a while, every month I got mail multiple times a week asking for more money along with my “free gift”. Even talking into account buying supplies in bulk and using every conservative low-ball numbers I estimated I was getting around 60% of my donation back every month. I just gave up and stopped donating, and even sent them a letter telling them why I was ending my donation. I still get mail from them at least once a month and it’s been at least 15 years since I last donated.
They are doing something extremely important, but I don’t want my donation being thrown away like that. Send me a donation envelope once a month, that’s fine even though I was making my donation online, but the almost every other day mailing that was packed with notepads and return address labels? Nope I’m not fund that. On the plus side I haven’t bought return address labels since Obama was in office, and I doubt I’ll have to buy any until Chad who just graduated from DeVry, becomes our 64th president.
The Crohns and Colitis foundation must have spent triple on mailers and phone calls than I have ever actually donated. It upsets me because I know how much good that organization does, and it’s upsetting to feel that my donation has contributed none to those efforts. Hopefully I’m wrong, but I’m speaking to how the pestering for more money makes me feel.
I donated regularly to Wikipedia and will again when they pull their heads out of their asses.
Still mad they stopped accepting Bitcoin?
No, probably the union busting
Holy shit
I donated to wikipedia once and they went after me every year like I had fed an hungry dog.
No, I doesn’t got more cookies boy!
I donate to them regularly, or at least I did until I found out they were going to spend my donation on union busting.
Yeah, this is why I stopped donating to them
I donated to them for a few years, $20 a year, so not much. And then one year they sent me an email that was very clearly meant to guilt trip me into thinking I wasn’t donating enough to the platform. So I cancelled the contribution instead.
Marketing people really love the smell of their own farts. They all feel like they are the smartest people ever.
I bet the person who typed up that email was thinking “hell yeah, I fucking got those suckers right where I want em.”
Worst part is they don’t even need the money right now but are claiming they do.
My good sir, I donated five dollars to Wikipedia
Enshittification comes for us all. But we really need to be proactive about saving wikipedia, or at least it’s data.
Wikimedia Foundation has enough assets to keep hosting Wikipedia for the next 60 years, according to their financial reports:
Wikipedia will really be fine. It is all the other expenses that raise eyebrows in a major way. This, of course, includes the pay of the executives and high-ranking officials that earn anywhere between $150k to $500k a year, and their salaries keep growing exponentially. At the same time, they spend donated money hiring union-busting firms - presumably, to crush on the latest unionization attempts and keep growing their pay.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries
It’s good the only thing required for a website is hosting costs that never increase. And not like… maintenance.
If your operating expenses for a website outweigh hosting 50:1 while most work is done by volunteers, something is seriously wrong with your books.
If you have a spare hard drive lying around (rare amidst this storage famine), consider downloading Wikipedia and a few other things you would be interested in. There are multiple ways to do this, but I’ll recommend Kiwix.
Literally just for the sake of preserving and archiving information, for a bunch of reasons (fascist retconning, natural disasters, cyber attacks, etc…). You don’t even have to seed it or make it available publicly. Use it if you want, or throw the drive into a drawer.
If anyone are unable to do this, absolutely no worries. But to those who can, please do. It helps.
I’ve done both. No need to grovel, but you can call me “your excellence”
A place I use to work purchased over 1000 licenses, no corporate discount, retail prices over 5 years.
Stupid dev refusing to use anything but winrar, stupid manager not contacting a reseller for a discount.Just a heads up, Wikipedia has been operating with huge margins, they’re completely safe and do not need donations right now.
can you point me at some data/facts about rhose margins?
Page 3 and 5, while it’s unclear the terms of the investments that make up the majority of their assets they still have net assets over 300 Million Dollars and have even been prepaying services far in advance. Their lease liability and accrued expenses are only 500K each and they payed an extra 4.5M to Wikimedia voluntarily last year, it’s expected that they could run the site somewhere between 50 to 100 years based on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
This essay is effectively a classic.
Even if it’s not necessarily a bad thing for Wikimedia Foundation to have so much income, just a few days ago it’s been revealed they have made a contract with a union busting legal agency, since their workers are forming one. In other words, money that people donate for Wikipedia is spent on internal bullshit conflicts by the increasingly insular leadership.
is there a place to donate to take money from unions?
I donated while they are begging for ir. And yeah i like Wikipedia so i did, later I found they do have more than enough.
I bought a copy to give back for decades of pirating everything.
My work was matching donations at one point and Wikipedia was an option so I donated $50 + $50 of corpo money to Wikipedia at one point. They’ve never stopped asking me for more
And now they’re using it to hire union busters. fuck em
I donated to Fraternal Order of Police in my 20’s when i was drinking the cool-aid, they hounded me for 25 more years.
Well this comment section just convinced me to never donate to Wikipedia :(
Wikipedia is volunteer-run and an awesome project.
Wikimedia on the other hand…
Are they the image hosting for Wikipedia or what’s their exact involvement?
Wikimedia mainly does the technical work like programming the servers and hosting the website.
You can think of it as almost like a tech company, they are even partnered with google, another union-busting tech company, tho wikimedia is a non-profit.
One issue people had is that only a small portion of donations go to wikipedia, and rest go to wikimedia’s other projects.
For example, they own the wikipedia trademark and sell merch, so donation money goes there also.
Honestly I overall liked the foundation, their other projects are still “free dictionary” and “free textbooks” and so on. However union-busing is really makimg me dislike them now.
What’s the point of union busting if they’re non-profit?
Non-profits still have employees and managers and so on.
Unions mean non-profits can’t just hire/fire people unfairly, and managers see it as a personal attack on them. They don’t want any less than 100% control.
Also corporate grants and donations give steady increases to their income, and unions mean more pay raises for employees rather than managerswhen that happens.
Technically “openai foundation” is also a non-profit too.
So, a long time ago, I tried using 7zip for extracting a zip file or similar. I don’t think it was a RAR file at the very least. I noticed that 7zip was slower than WinRAR, which is what I had always used since it was the first I’d heard of a program that could unzip files.
Fast forward a few years, I had some money and bought a WinRAR license, just because I liked the program that much.
Fast forward a few more years, and I use Nanazip on Windows and Ark on KDE/Fedora.
I will always remember the book stack icon for zips/RARs/etc. fondly and just how much faster (again way way back in the day). Multipart RARs were how I got a lot of stuff back in the day, even larger mods!
Anyway, I know it is popular to hate on WinRAR, but for me, it will always be remembered fondly for what it was. :,-)
Afaik (and I may be wrong), RAR is a proprietary format created by the guy who made winrar. Because of it, the compression/decompression libraries are licensed, and cannot be freely written. However, in order for the format to catch on, the developer released a freeware (free as in beer, not as in freedom) decompression library. That way, anyone can easily incorporate decompression code in their software, and thus, anyone can decompress a rar.
However, the code isn’t free to rewrite, so rar decompressors (at least those that don’t make a deal and pay money to winrar) are stuck with the same implementation of the rar decompressor. If that freeware code is slower than what winrar uses, winrar will always be faster.
Imho that’s a bit anti-competitive, and is what has kept me from ever using the RAR format. Especially now that we have way better formats (both in compression and features), like 7z.
I’ll be honest with you, I never cared about any of that stuff when I was younger, so it wouldn’t have made much of a difference to me back then.
As I said, the zipped file was not a RAR file, but this was almost 20 years ago, so that is a bit fuzzy. 7zip was much slower for the file that I unzipped, that much I do know! I still remember seeing a progress bar on 7zip, which I had never seen before on WinRAR (unless it was one of those multipart files, which was rare even then for me!). That is what stood out to me and why I can remember it so well. I even remember asking myself, “Why do people prefer 7zip if it is slower?”!
I will say these days I don’t use WinRAR, and just stick with Nanazip and Ark! I care more about stuff like that now though, so I appreciate you giving me more context! :-)
