The code for extracting RAR files was entirely rewritten by Igor Pavlov and released under LGPL, but RAR is a proprietary format and any work supporting its format specifications must, as explicit said in the RAR license by the original author of the format specifications Eugene Roshal, provide the additional clause of not being reverse engineered for creation of RAR files.Īny third party work, either the one from 7-Zip or form The Unarchiver, to have the right of using proprietary RAR file format specifications in order to provide a working extractor, must bring this additional clause with it, or at least it is what is required in RAR license - licensing is a very complex field and if and how this rule can be enforced, and if a software with this additional clause can still be considered Free Software is still matter of debate. I chose it because of good performances, stability, feature completeness, very good syntax, and because it handles most of the mainstream archive formats, so allowing me to reduce the number of dependencies on third parts component to test, to keep updated and to distribute with the software package, in order either to reduce the weight of the package - and to speed up development and debugging as fewer different backend syntax are supported. PeaZip backend for handling RAR format is Igor Pavlov's 7z, and its port p7zip on *x systems.

Originally posted by: The Unarchiver is a great software, I know and appreciate it.

The unarchiver rar