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Intentionally or not, Phil Katz achieved "embrace, extend, extinguish" with the .ARC format. When his program was compressing it would use a very effective for

Intentionally or not, Phil Katz achieved "embrace, extend, extinguish" with the .ARC format. When his program was compressing it would use a very effective format that was not understood by SEA's program. It still would have the .ARC extension, though. So SEA's program got the reputation of being broken because they wouldn't work on all .ARC files but PKArc would. Also SEA was basically two guys. Their lawyer may have expected PKWare to be a big business but this was a founder versus 2 co-founder dispute. It wasn't Microsoft or Oracle on the other side. It's hard to say what else they should or could have done under the circumstances.

sedatk 6y ago
According to SEA founders, he had ripped the source code too, having intact variable names and such. Apparently, first version of PKArc was pretty much ARC with assembly optimizations added.
superdisk 6y ago
A while back I emailed Thom Henderson for the ARC source code and he sent it to me. I planned to port it to Python for kicks but never got around to it...
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Isn't Python a poor choice of language for computationally intensive code?
  - superdisk 6y ago
    I just wanted to do it to learn how the code works.
tyingq 6y ago
Dean Cooper's post on the PkARC vs SEA topic is interesting. He was another person working on an archiver in the same time period. http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2398 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2398
neilv 6y ago
> Intentionally or not, Phil Katz achieved "embrace, extend, extinguish" with the .ARC format. I recall a text file circulating BBSes when I was a kid, around the time of the move from PKArc and PKXArc, to PKZip, supposedly detailing the visit of the lawyer to Phil Katz's house. IIRC, the file said that some evil corporate lawyer came to PK's house, PK was out, his mom didn't know why the lawyer was there, served him tea or lunch or something while they chatted, and then at the end, evil lawyer surprises the mom or PK with evil legal papers. At some point, PKZip appeared, and then downloads on BBSes started switching from `.ARC` to `.ZIP`. (There were a bunch of other packaging&compression formats, and you'd have a collection of the tools to extract whatever the download you found and got was in. But, IIRC, for awhile, `.ARC` was the most popular on free BBSes that I used, and then `.ZIP` became the most popular.) I don't know whether the stories of the legal action had anything to do with the move from .ARC to .ZIP, but I could believe it, on the free BBSes. They were generally run by hobbyists who could afford the computer and a phone line, and the time to give the BBS a character, and I got the impression that just wanted to make something and share. As far as I know, there wasn't any implicit subtle self-promotion, career development, etc., like there is in many things today, and a lot of corporate behavior that we consider normal within tech today, I think wouldn't have been considered acceptable. So, especially given the stories circulating about ARC vs. ZIP, it's really easy to imagine a "f-word those SEA guys" reaction from the altruists running BBSes in their dens.
- dctoedt 6y ago
  > I don't know whether the stories of the legal action had anything to do with the move from .ARC to .ZIP, but I could believe it, on the free BBSes. That's my very clear memory of what happened: PC Magazine and other trade rags reported that people were so pissed off at SEA that they switched en masse to .ZIP; it became a network effect, in that very soon everyone was using .ZIP because everyone was using .ZIP. I was a junior IP lawyer back then; it was a real eye-opener that if a company asserted its IP rights in what was perceived as a bullying way, the resulting PR blowback could destroy the company itself as people voted with their dollars. That was decidedly not what new IP lawyers were taught; much of the IP world regarded (and still regards) IP rights as virtually sacrosanct, to be prioritized over practically all other values.

sedatk 6y ago

According to SEA founders, he had ripped the source code too, having intact variable names and such. Apparently, first version of PKArc was pretty much ARC with assembly optimizations added.

superdisk 6y ago

A while back I emailed Thom Henderson for the ARC source code and he sent it to me. I planned to port it to Python for kicks but never got around to it...

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Isn't Python a poor choice of language for computationally intensive code?
- superdisk 6y ago
  I just wanted to do it to learn how the code works.

tyingq 6y ago

Dean Cooper's post on the PkARC vs SEA topic is interesting. He was another person working on an archiver in the same time period. http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2398 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2398

neilv 6y ago

> Intentionally or not, Phil Katz achieved "embrace, extend, extinguish" with the .ARC format. I recall a text file circulating BBSes when I was a kid, around the time of the move from PKArc and PKXArc, to PKZip, supposedly detailing the visit of the lawyer to Phil Katz's house. IIRC, the file said that some evil corporate lawyer came to PK's house, PK was out, his mom didn't know why the lawyer was there, served him tea or lunch or something while they chatted, and then at the end, evil lawyer surprises the mom or PK with evil legal papers. At some point, PKZip appeared, and then downloads on BBSes started switching from `.ARC` to `.ZIP`. (There were a bunch of other packaging&compression formats, and you'd have a collection of the tools to extract whatever the download you found and got was in. But, IIRC, for awhile, `.ARC` was the most popular on free BBSes that I used, and then `.ZIP` became the most popular.) I don't know whether the stories of the legal action had anything to do with the move from .ARC to .ZIP, but I could believe it, on the free BBSes. They were generally run by hobbyists who could afford the computer and a phone line, and the time to give the BBS a character, and I got the impression that just wanted to make something and share. As far as I know, there wasn't any implicit subtle self-promotion, career development, etc., like there is in many things today, and a lot of corporate behavior that we consider normal within tech today, I think wouldn't have been considered acceptable. So, especially given the stories circulating about ARC vs. ZIP, it's really easy to imagine a "f-word those SEA guys" reaction from the altruists running BBSes in their dens.

dctoedt 6y ago
> I don't know whether the stories of the legal action had anything to do with the move from .ARC to .ZIP, but I could believe it, on the free BBSes. That's my very clear memory of what happened: PC Magazine and other trade rags reported that people were so pissed off at SEA that they switched en masse to .ZIP; it became a network effect, in that very soon everyone was using .ZIP because everyone was using .ZIP. I was a junior IP lawyer back then; it was a real eye-opener that if a company asserted its IP rights in what was perceived as a bullying way, the resulting PR blowback could destroy the company itself as people voted with their dollars. That was decidedly not what new IP lawyers were taught; much of the IP world regarded (and still regards) IP rights as virtually sacrosanct, to be prioritized over practically all other values.