fwd: In Memorium of Phil Katz of pkzip (fwd)

[mikebw at colossus.bilow.com (Mike Bilow)]

I actually caught and circulated the announcement from the local Milwaukee
AP wire on this; it didn't even rate a national distribution.  I'll send
you a copy if you like.

The comments I have read, including this one, are somewhat disingenuous at
best.  I realize that most of the press has no awareness of the real
story, but this is lack of diligence since it was quite widely publicized
at the time.  Perhaps someone would have been curious about why Phil Katz,
inventor of ZIP compression, was found dead in a Milwaukee hotel room
clutching a liquor bottle.

In the ancient days of PCs, a company called System Enhancement Associates
(SEAware) developed one of the first archiving compression tools for DOS.  
They called it ARC, and it made ARC-format files.  The software and --
more importantly -- the file format were adopted as a de facto standard.  
In some circles, such as Fidonet, ARC became a de jure standard.

But SEAware ARC had problems.  It was very slow, and it had enough bugs so
that it would often corrupt files or just crash outright during
compression or decompression.  It had enough loose pointers around so that
it could crash DESQview.

So then-college student Phil Katz wrote a replacement for ARC, which he
called PKARC.  (He also split the compression and decompression functions
into separate tools, one called PKARC and the other PKXARC.)  PKARC did
not corrupt files or crash DESQview, its engine was written in assembly
language so it was very fast, and it was compatible with the ARC file
format, compression algorithm, and comand line interface.  Obviously, no
one wanted SEAware ARC anymore.

For the first time in the history of the United States, one shareware
author, SEAware, filed a lawsuit against another shareware author, Phil
Katz.  SEAware charged that Katz had infringed their intellectual
property, specifically that Katz had misappropriated the "ARC" name on
which SEAware claimed a trademark right, the ARC file format on which
SEAware claimed a copyright, and the ARC command-line interface on which
SEAware claimed numerous protections including "look and feel" copyright.

Now, it is important to understand a few things.  First, a trademark, in
order to be protectable at law, must be "distinctive."  If you take a
common word and truncate or misspell it in such a way as to merely
describe your product, this is not a trademark.  For example, if your name
is "Hamilton" and you sell pharmaceuticals, this does not mean you can get
trademark protection for "Hamilton Pharmaceuticals."  Also, a trademark is
by definition less distinctive as it gets shorter, and it approaches the
legally ridiculous to claim that "ARC" is a protectable trademark for an
archiving program.  (It should be understood that "SEAware ARC" might be a
perfectly valid trademark, but not bare "ARC" alone.)

It is also important to understand that the command-line interface to ARC,
and therefore to PKARC/PKXARC, was the sort of thing that any intelligent
12 year-old might design.  For example, "-a" meant "add to archive," "-l"
meant "list archive," and "-x" meant "extract from archive."  The idea of
SEAware alleging infringement of something like this on a "look and
feel" theory was universally seen as frivolous, even in the context of the
times when Apple and Borland were involved in more substantial disputes
and the ultimate worthlessness of "look and feel" claims had yet to be
established by the courts.

Nevertheless, SEAware prosecuted this case vigorously.  They kept Phil
Katz tied up in court, costing him a lot of money.  In fact, at one point,
a legal defense fund had to be established for Phil Katz because his legal
expenses were exceeding his sharware income.  SEAware also made overt
threats against anyone who used PKARC/PKXARC, and they were for a time
somewhat effective in getting Phil Katz's software banned from use in some
parts of Fidonet as "piracy."  All of these were acts of desperation by
SEAware, which was trying to hang onto whatever business it could with an
obviously inferior and unstable product faced with competition against
which their only effective weapon was legal harassment.

Not surprisingly, SEAware's legal harassment approach mostly worked.  
They were able to force Phil Katz into an out-of-court settement, which
was his only realistic alternative to bankruptcy.  He agreed to change the
name of his product, which became "PKPAK" instead of "PKARC."  He was
allowed to make one final release of the product to reflect the name
change, and then was not allowed to improve or upgrade support for the ARC
file format or compression algorithm.  He had to agree that his use of the
ARC file format and compression algorithm was subject to license from
SEAware.  As far as I know, the "look and feel" complaint was dropped.

Shortly after the settlement and the release of PKPAK 3.61, which was of
course the only release of PKPAK, Phil Katz produced PKZIP.  He used
nothing from ARC, discarding its compression algorithm and file format,
and even making gratuitous changes to the command-line interface.  For
example, "-e" instead of "-x" was used for "extract from archive."  
Almost immediately, ZIP became the definitive standard for compression,
and today no one even remembers either ARC or SEAware.  In fact, because
PKZIP was deliberately incompatible with ARC, it became clear that SEAware
had shot themselves in the foot by forcing a wholesale abandonment rather
than a gradual shift to ZIP.  More bitter about his experience than
perhaps anyone realized at the time, Phil Katz included this message (as
DEDICATE.DOC) in early versions of PKZIP:

    Dedication
    ----------

    The file format of the files created by these programs, which file
    format is original with the first release of this software, is hereby
    dedicated to the public domain.  Further, the filename extension of
    ".ZIP", first used in connection with data compression software on the
    first release of this software, is also hereby dedicated to the public
    domain, with the fervent and sincere hope that it will not be
    attempted to be appropriated by anyone else for their exclusive use,
    but rather that it will be used to refer to data compression and
    librarying software in general, of a class or type which creates files
    having a format generally compatible with this software.

This challenge has been taken seriously by the InfoZIP group, which has
ported ZIP compression to almost every conceivable platform for free:

	ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/infozip/

Regardless of CNet's reviews, my Windows machines do not run either WinZip
or Netzip; instead they run WiZ:

	ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/infozip/WIN32/wiz501xN.exe

And now you know why.

-- Mike


On 2000-04-29 at 00:13 -0400, David Kramer wrote:
* * *
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> CNET | Digital Dispatch 
> DNA Computing, Guide to Start Pages, ICQ 2000a Arrives
> April 27, 2000
> Vol. 6, No. 17
> 
> News of Phil Katz's death was just made public earlier this week. You may
> never have heard of Phil Katz, but chances are, you've used the product
> he's known for. Back in 1986, Katz developed a file format--which he
> called "ZIP"--that allowed files to be compressed to a fraction of their
> original size and later restored, unscathed, to their previous state.  He
> designed a simple but effective program to do this and named it PKZip,
> using his own initials (and ensuring for himself some degree of
> immortality in the process). The program was a massive shareware hit, and
> ZIP quickly became the industry standard compression format.
> 
> More dreamy innovator than businessman, Katz was never able to fully
> capitalize on his ubiquitous creation, and when he died on April 14 of
> complications from alcoholism at the age of 37, his passing was largely
> ignored.
> 
> But his legacy lives on. Nowadays, most files downloaded from the Internet
> bear the suffix .zip. In fact, this week we're featuring a showdown
> between the latest versions of WinZip and Netzip, the best known of
> today's ZIP utilities. Phil, this one's for you.
> 
> --Steve Fox, Editor, CNET Online


-
Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with
"subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the
message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).