"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."
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.
When Katz died people asked the ARC people what they thought about him: http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html
>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 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.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/74x5e/phil_kat...
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.
>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."