Misguided call for a 7-Zip boycott brings attention to FOSS archiving tools • The Register
ANALYSIS A blog post calling for a boycott of the well-known 7-Zip compression app is attracting some discussion on Reddit. However, it seems criticism for Igor Pavlov and his FOSS compression app 7-Zip is somewhat overblown and may reflect the anti-Russian sentiment of the times. 7-Zip has been around since 1999 and during that two-decade span there have been more widely used Windows compression tools (WinZip and WinRAR, in particular) they are shareware, so try-before-you-buy versus free. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the shareware model. It has been around longer than the modern FOSS ecosystem, and there are some excellent shareware tools. However, a lot of people aren't really trying before a potential purchase: they never intend to pay. And if that's the case, then you might as well use free software and avoid nag screens. Let's dissect the critical points around 7-Zip. The blogger, identified only as Paul, claims that 7-Zip isn't really open source because the code isn't
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