No offense but one of the MOST important feature is having an "OPEN FORMAT" ...

[Catalin]

... and that is very often neglected in most reviews ... so from this point of view what do you think would be the real best programs ?

[dtrud0h]

I guess in this case a dictionary program that gave a good definition of "Open Format"

[mouser]

i think zaine tried to advocate for the open format 7-zip in his review, didn't he?

[Jibz]

I think WinRAR is 'open enough'. The source code for decompression is available, and if you think about it, that's the really important thing. Even if the company should go under, you should always be able to compile the decompression source and retrieve your data.

[mouser]

i find myself in rare disagreement with jibz here.
i think the closed nature of winrar is a very bad thing, and in a field like compression where there are so many good open source compression algorithms, i think it's a bad thing that the rar format has become so widely used.  it's like mp3, we get stuck in this trap of a proprietary format.