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Comment by fogleman | Hacker News Reader

An interesting point of view I found via Google:

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.

> 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."

What a stunningly vindictive and spiteful thing to say.

This is the very first time I've ever heard anyone say "he deserved to die because he stole my code."

(Don't worry, I'm not shooting the messenger! I appreciate your posting this - it's a fascinating look at human nature.)

Putting this in to context, at the time Thom had to basically go under the radar because of all the hate mail and threats he got because of the ARC / PKWare legal battle, supposedly these email threats were prompted in part by Phil himself.

It definitely doesn't make it OK to say "this person deserved to die," but I think it's worth considering it in context, as these people weren't strangers to each other and their actions both had powerful effects on one another.

That does add a lot of context! Thanks for mentioning it. What a bad situation all around.

I'm honestly not sure how you can equivocate a haunted conscience with death.

It wasn't that part that struck me - obviously he wrote the copyright statement long before. What bothered me was "...it is a fitting demise...".

"no more fitting epitaph" != "a fitting demise"

I didn't confuse those two phrases. "a fitting demise" is a direct quote:

> 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.

(emphasis added)

(FYI, I think you mean equate, not equivocate)

This:

"In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988.

Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it. "

is contradicted by this:

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

"... settlement of the lawsuit ... under which ... PKWARE paid SEA to obtain a license that allowed the distribution of PKWARE's ARC-compatible programs until January 31, 1989, after which PKWARE would not license, publish or distribute any ARC compatible programs or utilities that process ARC compatible files.

...

After the lawsuit, PKWARE released one last version of his PKARC and PKXARC utilities under the new names "PKPAK" and "PKUNPAK", and from then on concentrated on developing the separate programs PKZIP and PKUNZIP, which were based on new and different file compression techniques."

Wiki also says

"The SEA vs. PKWARE dispute quickly expanded into one of the largest controversies the BBS world ever saw."

Any greybeards care to comment?

I remember all three formats.

You have to keep in mind the context of the times; there was no Linux yet, almost no one had heard of the internet, and certainly there were no things like the world wide web or wikipedia. No one really knew about open source or the legal fight between SEA and PKWARE. We all switched to PKZIP because it created the same size archive files as ARC and it uncompressed so much faster.

In 1988 I was 14, and really just wanted to play more shareware games. It really didn't matter what format they came in, but if they were in ZIP format, that was great since it took less time to uncompress on a 4.77 MHz processor (yes, you read that correctly - I boosted it to 8 MHz with an 8088 clone chip by NEC called a V20). A few years later it was all moot anyway, since I discovered Linux and everything was using tar/compress or shar (shell archives).

Wow. The memories. I ran the hub for a CAD/CAM and animation themed BBS network. We would switch to the latest, greatest (e.g. PKPAK) almost immediately to reduce phone bills.

You aren't kidding. I'm having NEC V20 flashbacks.

I remember feeling incredibly bad assed as a young teenager prying the old 8088 chip out and slotting in this new processor which came in the strange plastic tube which I bought at some random hole-in-the-wall PC shop in Vancouver. I think I had just read Neuromancer for the first time at that point. It was a definite Future Shock moment for me.

This was about the same time period that companies started suing over "look and feel". One prominent example at the time was Lotus suing (I think) Paperback Software, and also Quarterdeck Software (Quatro Pro). So, when it appeared that the same was happening between Sea and PKware, many BBS operators (at least in the Midwest) dumped Arc for Zip almost overnight. What made it worse was that PKarc was significantly faster than Sea's arc, so it looked like "If you can't compete, then sue". Of course, a lot of the details were kept sealed while the court case was going on, and all people had to go by then was what leaked out.

I didn't care about the controversy I just remember re-packing all of my files in .zip to save more space on my BBS.

Unfreezing...Melting....OOOO00000oooooo........

That reminds me of ARJ, I have no memory of why, but I was a much bigger fan of ARJ than zip.

Me too. ARJ was easier to use IIRC, specially with muli-volume archives (frequent if you had to split an archive into several diskettes).

I used ARJ mostly, until RAR came in, of course ;)

Did someone forget LHA / LZH?

I wasn't aware of the controversy at the time, but I do remember there being a fairly rapid transition from .ARC to .ZIP on the BBSes I used around that time.

Wow, I had no idea the ARC source was open. IIRC, at the time PKARC and PKZIP were legendary, and the Sea guys got a bad rep from the whole situation. But reading that post and the ARC license now, it sure does look like Katz was a putz.

> Wow, I had no idea the ARC source was open.

Of course, the ARC source wasn't really "open" in the sense we use the term today. Hence SEA's ability to file a lawsuit against Katz.

On the other hand, the .zip file format really was open in the sense we use the term today.

Exec-PC (huge BBS based in Milwaukee, WI) was full of anti-SEA propaganda in those days, which was just bizarre and I didn't understand why at the time.

I also didn't realize the code was open. If only we had github in BBS form in the 90s.

Using PC Pursuit to packet switch your way to Milwaukee without a long-distance phone call.

In the event that anyone happens to be interested in knowing more about the conflict between SEA and PKWARE, here's a pretty solid collection of notes and BBS postings.

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONTROVERSY/LAWSUITS/S...

> I know that seems strange these days, but back then a lot of software was distributed in source

What is old is new again

You know what's peculiar? Thom Henderson wrote that after Katz's death in 2000. At what point in the last thirteen years would anyone think that distributing source code is strange?

You must not have been there. Back when windows was the only OS that mattered, the way you distributed software was as windows binaries. Most users didn't even have a compiler.

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