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Comment by jdeibele | Hacker News Reader

The article kind of glosses over the battle with System Enhancement Associates. As a sysop (long time since I used that word), ARC was extremely popular. Then PKarc came out and it generated files that were more compact but kept the extension .ARC. SEA's product couldn't unpack those. So their product got the reputation as the one that didn't work.

The lawsuit was extremely unpopular given that they were both shareware products and the older, more established company was suing the company with a better product.

It wasn't clear now or then what else SEA could have done.

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Couldn't they have just made him an offer too good to refuse to buy PKarc? I haven't read up on the background so perhaps they already tried this. But it seems like that's the "big company" playbook. At least if you're substantially bigger than your competitor.

There are some programmers on Hacker News who probably are paid more than I'm guessing both companies combined made. As I remember it (could be wrong now), SEA was two programmers and PKWare was Phil Katz (and his mom).

"The leaked agreement document revealed that under the settlement terms, the defendants had paid the plaintiff $22,500 for past royalty payments and $40,000 for expense reimbursements."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz

I was about to say the same thing. For all the hard work, risks, stress, and high drama involved, we're talking about fairly trivial amounts of money for both parties.

To put it in perspective, the royalty payment that constitutes the settlement is less than what the most people pay for a new car or the average cost of a wedding in the U.S.

Given the leaked documents about the settlement (per Wikipedia) and knowing what most people pay for shareware (which is zero), I doubt the article's claim that Katz had a "multimillion-dollar company". This makes his struggles and story even sadder.

Despite the name it was actually the smaller company. The relevant articles and info are linked from Wikipedia and make for interesting reading.

When Katz died people asked the ARC people what they thought about him: http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html

From your link:

>So now Phil Katz is dead. He drank himself to death, alone in a motel room, a bottle of booze in his hand and five empties in the room. One can only guess what drove him to such a tragic end, but it is a fitting demise for a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie.

What a heartless asshole.

I am old enough to have actually been involved with FidoNet when all of this was going down, and at the time Katz pretty much had the community believing that he was a little guy being unfairly squashed by the huge corporate behemoth of System Enhancement Associates for making a better version of their software. Pretty much every single bit of that turned out, indeed, to be a lie. Katz did steal SEA's work and claimed otherwise, and SEA was smaller than PKWare.

I get where you're coming from, but Katz basically stole Henderson's work, lied about it, and destroyed Henderson's business and, for many years, his reputation. I don't think I can really blame him for not having been terribly diplomatic about the man's death.

This 8 year old comment on reddit[1] sheds more light on the controversy from a person who knew him I guess.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/74x5e/phil_kat...

The whole thing hurts because things got twisted for no reasons. Both tiny business. Birth of networks. Katz did not only rename and sell, based on the reddit comment it had value. It's just that social perception and hubris turned into a sour sauce. If Katz and Henderson's companies managed to collaborate instead of going into battle .. I can easily see immensely better ending for both parties.

> What a heartless asshole.

Agreed. Most of us have either experienced ourselves or seen someone suffer from an illness or condition we wouldn't "wish on our worst enemy".

Most of us.

You forgot to quote the harshest part:

>I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement:

>"If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life."

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