Who Is the Original Creator of Unrar?

The original creator of the unrar utility is the Russian software engineer Eugene Roshal. Developed alongside the proprietary RAR compression format in the early 1990s, the unrar tool was designed to extract files from RAR archives without requiring a full graphical archiver. This article details Roshal's creation of the tool, its role in cross-platform computing, and how its licensing model influenced software distribution.

Eugene Roshal developed the RAR file format and its supporting tools in 1993. The name "RAR" itself stands for "Roshal Archive." At the time, Roshal developed command-line utilities for DOS to both create and unpack these compressed files. While compression remained closely guarded, Roshal recognized that broad adoption of his new format depended on users being able to extract their data across multiple operating systems. To solve this, he developed the dedicated unrar utility and released its source code.

The unrar source code is made freely available by Roshal and RARLAB under a specific license. Anyone can use, compile, and distribute the decompression code, which allowed developers to port the utility to Linux, Unix, macOS, and other systems. However, Roshal’s license explicitly forbids using the unrar source code to recreate the RAR compression algorithm. As a result, third-party software could freely read RAR files, but only official RAR software could create them.

Over time, Eugene Roshal stepped back from public management and active licensing of the utilities, assigning the copyright and maintenance of RAR and WinRAR to his brother, Alexander Roshal. However, Eugene Roshal remains credited as the original architect of the compression format and the creator of the original unrar utility.