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!?"
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!
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).
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!?"