Comment 0 for bug 1199148

unar has the advantage of being truly free software: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/free-rarv3-extraction

unar also provides sophisticated encoding handling (for RAR archive and much more) which can be really useful for certain users.

For example, RAR archives created by very old version of WinRAR is not Unicode enabled and unrar cannot correctly extract them.
See also: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=568782