Hacker News Reader

Comment by iwanttocomment | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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...

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com