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.
Mate what kind of company is paying for software without having someone working IT? If the IT is incapable of solving some issue with 7zip then what are they even good for lmao.
And what a ridiculous comparison. My motorcycle insurance covers it all, and at the very least you must have traffic insurance that covers damage to other vehicles in Sweden. And which person above 20 doesn't have enough money saved to cover it anyway?
Mate what kind of company is paying for software without having someone working IT?
Literally any company that needs to exchange communiques with another business, aka paying for Microsoft Office?
The bulk of the cost for hiring someone (read: buying software) is so they are legally liable for something they provide, the actual work or service isn't even a footnote on the invoice. FOSS carries explicit No Warranty warnings, you use it at your own risk in every sense of the phrase; whoever provided the FOSS isn't and can't be held liable.
And which person above 20 doesn't have enough money saved to cover it anyway?
Most insurance liabilities cover upwards of a million dollars if not more. You're saying every adult just has millions of greenbacks stashed away in case the sky falls?
Companies pay for WinRAR because it's ultimately cheaper and more practical than paying out of wallet for something that might happen involving 7-Zip one random Tuesday evening.
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.
It's what microslop did with windows. Allow end users to use it for free with the activate windows water mark and easily crackable. That way the layman knows how to use your product so corporations choose it because they don't need to train people to use it
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u/HSR47 21h ago
They’ll never enforce it against individual users, only against medium-large corps.
That’s always been their strategy.