On 4 January 2011 01:08, Thomas Bächler <thomas@archlinux.org> wrote:
It was removed from the repos and replaced by 'unrar' a few years ago, as the license of 'rar' did not allow redistribution, while 'unrar' did. I don't know when this happened, but I do know there was mailing list discussion and tpowa was involved. That is all I remember.
Ahh, I knew there was a story behind this. Anyway, it looks like it can now be redistributed: 5. The RAR/WinRAR unlicensed trial version may be freely distributed, with exceptions noted below, provided the distribution package is not modified in any way. a. No person or company may distribute separate parts of the package with the exception of the UnRAR components, without written permission of the copyright owner. b. The RAR/WinRAR unlicensed trial version may not be distributed inside of any other software package without written permission of the copyright owner. c. Hacks/cracks, keys or key generators may not be included on the same distribution. This still wasn't clear to me, so I sent an e-mail and got this: "If you redistribute exactly the same set of files as in original rarlinux-4.0.b3.tar.gz tar archive, then it is allowed even if you changed the packaging format from tar.gz to format, which is more suitable for your Linux distribution. So yes, your redistribution approach is OK." Anyway, in light of the history, I think it is best to skip extra this time.