Re: Documentary..
By: Nightfox to Mro on Fri Dec 27 2013 08:09 am
I was too young to really be aware of the PKWare vs. SEA thing at the time, but it was interesting to hear about it on the BBS Documentary. I agree it was unfortunate that Phil Katz was no longer around to tell his side, but there's really nothing anyone can do about that. From what I remember, supposedly Phil Katz took the source code to ARC and changed it a bit and passed it on as PKZip - I suppose I'll have to look around online for more information on that to see if it's true or not. But I did think it was an
no, that's not what happened. first: almost everyone was sharing their source. people wouldnt even run the program without seeing the source.
what phil did was take the arc source and add his own optimizations to it. he made it better, then called it pkarc. like when nico-mac made winzip out of the pkware code. like many other occurances.
thom from sea wanted to get paid. he was the type of guy that used 'we' a lot like he was a big company. he also would bother other developers and threaten them with lawsuits *just because they MUST* have used his code to develop their compression program... even though thom had no access to that developer's code. he was essentially sending out letters that said "pay me or be sued".
that in the bbs doc where thom said phil katz copied his source code, word for word, even the spelling mistakes can not be corroborated. that is a line his family has said since the beginning and there is no proof.
if he copied the source code 100% and passed it off as his own, then why was it better? sea was mad because everyone was switching to pkarc.
there was a lot of bitterness from the sea family about this situation. in their mind they should have become millionaires. in the end, phil build pkzip from scratch and released the spec. .zip won over .arc on merrit.
not only that, but he still was making a lot of money and his employees were being paid well. this is something SEA never did.
eventually phil died of alcholism, probably partially related to his success.
I live in that area and i know one guy who worked at pkware. it was a great place to work. Phil even went to the strip club i go to.
it's messed up that they talked so badly about a dead man who couldnt defend himself. all the msg net arguing is still saved and you can go online and read it for yourself. it's interesting. sea was all family. brother , sister, brother in law. they would lie and cheat to get their point across and the people on the msg networks caught them a few times.
it's just messed up to give so much facetime to a sore loser loser who technically won the lawsuit but lost the war.
here's from thom's webpage after he heard phil died:
"
Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it.
We sort of lost touch after that. We would have liked to have kept in touch, but we couldn't afford the legal bills. There wasn't a lot to sue for anyway. None of us was getting rich.
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."
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