Shareware Software Misrepresented by Download Sites

(PRWEB) February 2, 2006 -- It has come to the attention of win.rar GmbH that some download Websites have recently represented WinRAR and other shareware in a misleading light.

These kind of download sites charge a membership fee and in exchange enable their users to download certain shareware programs. However, since the philosophy behind shareware is that these programs can be tested totally free of charge for a certain time period, they can normally be downloaded for free via the publisher's Websites anyways. Further, said download sites often do not state explicitly that users only receive the download of a trial version. They give the impression that users acquire the right to unlimited use of the program.

However, after users have downloaded, for example WinRAR, from one of these sites, they will of course discover that they have only downloaded the trial version. This has led to numerous complaints from users to shareware publishers, because they believe that publishers are associated with these sites. However, win.rar GmbH distances itself from download sites that follow these nontransparent practices and does not cooperate with them in any way.

To protect internet users from such misleading download sites, win.rar GmbH considers it important to spread the knowledge that shareware can generally be downloaded for free via the website of the publisher. Furthermore, internet users should always check what they actually get before signing up for one of those download sites and agreeing to pay a membership fee.

About WinRAR:
WinRAR is a 32-bit Windows version of RAR Archiver, the powerful archiver and archive manager. WinRAR's main features are very strong general and multimedia compression, solid compression, archive protection from damage, processing of ZIP and other non-RAR archives, scanning archives for viruses, programmable self-extracting archives(SFX), authenticity verification, NTFS and Unicode support, strong AES encryption, support of multivolume archives, command line and graphical interface, drag-and-drop facility, wizard interface, theme support and Windows x64 shell integration. WinRAR is available in 40 different languages and runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2000/ME/XP/2003. The command line version RAR is available for Linux, DOS, OS/2, FreeBSD and MAC OS X. Pocket RAR, the free WinRAR version for Pocket PCs, completes the compression product range.