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Comment by wdfx | Hacker News Reader

So, the lesson here is to take something which you know to be a sub-optimal product, simultaneously sell and abandon it, and spend all the proceeds on luxury goods?

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Naah, dude really didn't have a choice here. His two options were to be shown the door by Microsoft (where he worked) because he (inadvertently) wrote and released a piece of software that competed with an upcoming Windows feature... or he could sell them his app, which they would then functionally abandon, and he'd get enough money to buy a sweet 'Vette. There's an absurdity to that situation that says more about the Microsoft of the '90s than about anything this dude did.

This is a fairer interpretation, thanks.

> be shown the door by Microsoft (where he worked) because he (inadvertently) wrote and released a piece of software that competed with an upcoming Windows feature

It's a shame though that the limitations in the shell integration were never worked out. This manifests itself in myself and probably countless others installing 7-zip as the first thing to install on any fresh windows installation simply because the built in zip support is sooo painfully slow.

>the limitations in the shell integration were never worked out.

If I had to bet, I'd say it's deliberate. It's Windows code, it works, and it still works. God knows what will break if you change that hallowed code.

They could buy out 7zip, shove it into Windows install, and make the existing UI point to 7zip API calls instead of explorer.exe ones. A drop-in shim, that would improve quality of life for millions.

How would that increase revenue?

By making a percentage of those people less likely to migrate to another platform.

Of course it's a guessing game to try to put any numbers (amount or $ values) to any of that.

Who is going to migrate off Windows over ZIP performance? Microsoft doesn't care if you use 7Zip over built in, they got your money already.

It's a small thing, but many small things can add up to one platform feeling nicer. Like personally I can't stand the Apple ecosystem, but I know many that prefer it these days.

7zip is libre software, they woudn't need too.

It's LGPL. If they kept to the existing interfaces they wouldn't need to, but honestly they aren't great. For someone like MS it's probably easier to buy either 7zip or WinRar out than to assure license conformity for the coming decades.

they actually do work, but only under powershell. There's also a tar.exe but I haven't managed to get a valid tarball out of it.

As the maintainer for Windows in-box bsdtar/libarchive, I'd love to learn more!

How are the tarballs you get out of it invalid? Do you have a sample file I could take a look at?

FWIW, since it is bsdtar it supports a few additional options[1] to control the format. You can pass --format=gnutar, --format=zip, --format=ustar, --format=7zip, ... for a bit more flexibility and to create archives in other formats.

[1]: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bsdtar&sektion=1&f...

I'm sure it was user error but `tar -czf` failed to produce a tarball I could untar on a server. Maybe due to it calling the wrong zip.exe? Maybe unzip on the server was using a different zlib or something? I'm not quite sure what it was but I decided to switch to using tar.xz for nix and zip for windows.

I'll see if my old devops code history can produce a bad-state tarball and get back to you.

And, given what MS did to Stacker[1], competing probably would not have gone well.

[1]: https://tedium.co/2018/09/04/disk-compression-stacker-double...

He says he got permission in writing before his employment. So not much risk there, I hope.

What do you expect?

When I've sold something - am I expected to continue to maintain it out of the goodness of my own heart? It's not owned by me anymore. If the purchaser wants to maintain it and/or pay me to then that's up to them. It's Microsoft which abandoned it, not the individual.

Probably I can't even create a more-optimal product. Any contract worth the paper it is written on would have a clause which says 'you can't go out and recreate an identical product immediately'.

And yes, it's a luxury purchase, but it was an unexpected windfall. They had a job with Microsoft so were presumably making a decent wage that covered their regular expenses already. Why not buy something to make you happy?

I know there's more to it; I'm just being overly cynical this Monday morning.

The lesson is to work on topics that are used by billions and make something small and useful, that is hard to replicate and thus worth a buyout.

There is nothing hard to replicate here.

Microsoft could have put 3 of their programmers to work on this for one month. But it's probably faster and more convenient to just buy it out.

Perfect is the enemy of good, especially in business. This is nothing new.

The fundamental point of capitalism is that you work, get paid, and then can spend your money on whatever you want even if its silly. If the author likes cars, so be it.

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