What If...

[exogenesis]

Unofficial version (only one unofficial version to exist ever, so we all keep track of it)

A version that has all extras that cannot be included in UE official version.

There are many things that UE official cannot have included, which would improve UE extracting of other installers.

Nitro - delete this if out of context or bad for UE future.

[MCT]

do u mean like making it open source? so others can have input on it?

i think that'd be a good idea, im not much of a coder myself, but the program has a good concept & i think others can benefit from it if the code was released & maybe approved upon

[exogenesis]

Unofficial to have only the unpackers of the installers that UE can never have included.

Maybe it will need to be hosted on another forum and site, a reliable site.

Everyone build for one version not multiple different ones. Having newer versions more often. With a final relase version more often, so no beta testing forever.

...I'm not a coder i'm just thinking out aloud for an unofficial version to be scripted/coded.

Edited October 26, 2008 by exogenesis

[nitro322]

I'm having some trouble understanding what you mean. I believe you're suggesting that someone create an "unofficial" version of Universal Extract that natively includes support for formats for which no freely redistributable utilities exist, such as InstallShield 12.x, later versions of Stuff-It, etc. The problem with this doing this is that it's illegal, at least in the United States. Even if someone were to create an unofficial version, that unofficial version would be illegal to distribute, host, etc.

While I'd love to add support for these formats, officially or unofficially, there's just no way to do it legally. Probably the best option would be to add support in the code for these formats, but require the end-user to provide the support utilities to do the extraction. For example, I could add support for InstallShield 12.x, but not include the needed iscab.exe (and related) utilities. If the end-user has a legitimate copy of InstallShield, he could copy these utilities to the bin\ directory, and then it'd just automatically work. I'm not sure if I want to go down that road, but I've seen similar techniques done before in other open source apps, and as far as I can tell it should be perfectly legal.

As for source code, UniExtract is already released under the GPL. Anyone's welcome to modify the source however they'd like in accordance with the terms of the GPL.