
What the author of ARC thinks about Phil Katz - d0mine
http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html
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noonespecial
Sounds like sour grapes to me. I remember the arc vs pkarc vs pkzip deal. [1]

PKArc was arc with its compression routines rewritten in _assembly_. In most
cases it was 5x faster. In many cases it was 10x. 10-upping a program's
performance with your mad "mov ax" skills is a little bit more than
"...professional reputation is based entirely on a lie." Back in the day, this
was genius incarnate.

Phil made no effort to hide that it was arc redone better. He called it PKArc.
May as well have simply said "Phil Katz does Arc." When he got into legal
trouble (he was a far better engineer than business man, after all). He just
said, "hell, these things aren't hard, I'll just make my own." and we got
pkzip, which was an even further improvement.

He had skills, he had attitude, he had zero business sense. He lived hard and
died young. He could have done better. He was _not_ "a man whose professional
reputation is based entirely on a lie." IMHO, the author of arc should have
spent a little more time with his assembler, a little less time with his
lawyer, and a lot less time whining about the whole deal.

 _[1] Yeah, I know, some wide eyed youngsters are now going "you remember the
zip wars!?"_

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jrockway
+1

Rewriting someone else's software to be 10x faster is neither illegal nor
unethical. In fact, it's a great idea.

~~~
petercooper
In an ideal world, maybe. But it was illegal in this case as demonstrated by
Thom Henderson's success in his lawsuit against Katz.

~~~
nihilocrat
These days we have the advantage of popular open source licenses, and thus
there is a strong culture of "if the source is available, it's okay to write
improvements and re-release it. In fact, the source should always be available
and free to be improved upon.". Whenever I read about software battles of the
70s and 80s I always feel like the engineers of the day could be pretty petty
and against improvement and innovation. No, you can't look at my wheel, go
reinvent your own one, freeloader!

~~~
petercooper
Agreed. That seems to be a common occurrence in the beginning of any industry
though. Take Web applications, for example. While we now have lots of
extremely high quality desktop apps (heck, the whole stack really), there are
only a relative handful of pro-quality Web applications that aren't
proprietary (WordPress, Drupal, SugarCRM, etc) compared to those that are
closed (GMail, FeedBurner, Google itself, heck.. almost any major Web app out
there).

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Jasber
"We 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 terrible thing to say about someone who is dead, regardless of whether
they stole anything.

~~~
breck
I read once a quote, I think by some senator in the 1800's, who responded to
someone's attack on a man who had just died by saying : "Sir, when God puts
his hands on another man, I take mine off."

That's a bad paraphrase, but the original quote was pretty good.

~~~
procrastitron
It seems to have been Thomas Hart Benton speaking about John C. Calhoun:

[http://books.google.com/books?id=JLpYAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA34...](http://books.google.com/books?id=JLpYAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=thomas+benton+when+god+lays+his+hand&source=web&ots=cTjIxvRLMb&sig=mThzycHFzB7rihltYzfsCoqIN3E)

And you actually got the quote pretty close to correct:

"No, sir. When God Almighty lays his hand upon a man, sir, I take mine off,
sir."

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ericb
Curseware licenses are apparently enforceable, but not very profitable...

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mattmaroon
Well, at least he wasn't bitter about it.

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TweedHeads
Good to know both sides of the story

