tes@whutt.UUCP (STERKEL) (06/18/88)
> >> Anybody got an e-mail address for Thom Henderson, so we can all flame >> him personally? I was here two years ago when the consensus was that Phil Katz *ripped-off* SEA's intellectual achievement. (I was also the first one to post PK* vs SEA performance tests.) After com- municating with Mr. Katz on a compatibility problem between PK* and Fansi-console, I dropped use of his software for the following reasons: 1. No monetary recognition of SEA's intellectual property. 2. Phil Katz's arbitrary revision of the SEA standard creating *.arc files incompatible with other *arc programs. (yes, I know about the patches/command files, *but* the default is incompatible. 3. Incompatible with Fansi-console during operations with contaminated files (reported to the net and Mr. Katz). However, this is (very) old news. Could someone please inform me when Mr. Katz became the hero/victum? No matter what the apparent benefits, it remains against my sense of professional ethics to benefit from other's intellectual achievement without giving them full credit. There is NO concept or application on an idea that cannot be improved on. If we do not protect the ORIGINATOR we get what we deserve...no innovation...just rehashed old ideas. (An example is the fact that 1-2-3 and its 100's of clones are little more than implementation enhancements of Visicalc(r). Maybe no one wants to be the next Visicalc and that is why we have seen so little innovation in the PC world, just rip-offs of previous ideas) Just a thought for the flamers to stoke up on, terry
W8SDZ@SIMTEL20.ARPA (Keith Petersen) (06/19/88)
> Date: Saturday, 18 June 1988 10:41-MDT > From: mtunx!whuts!whutt!tes@rutgers.edu (STERKEL) > Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc > Re: WAIT-A-MINIT!! Re: Re: Re: Phil Katz (PKARC author) > ..I dropped use of his software for the following reasons: > > 1. No monetary recognition of SEA's intellectual property. Why should there be? SEA's ARC is a ripoff of the Unix compress program, Richard Greenlaw's squeeze/unsqueeze and LZW's copyrighted works. > 2. Phil Katz's arbitrary revision of the SEA standard creating > *.arc files incompatible with other *arc programs. (yes, > I know about the patches/command files, *but* the default > is incompatible. The default is anything you want it to be with PK36. YOU create the configure file. Incompatible? If I were worried about that I would be yelling about the fact that my original XMODEM program (yes I wrote the first one and the name "XMODEM" is mine) has been enhanced and improved by others to the point where it is partly incompatible with my original version. I'm not complaining - I'm enjoying the new features! The only thing that upsets me is that Irv Hoff took the program, changed its name, added some new features, and copyrighted it. Sound familiar? Can you say SEA's ARC sounds like compress, ar, sq/usq, and LZW? I thought you could! > 3. Incompatible with Fansi-console during operations with > contaminated files (reported to the net and Mr. Katz). Where have you been? This was fixed. I use PKARC and Fansi-Console together all the time - without any troubles. > ....If we do not protect the ORIGINATOR we get what we > deserve...no innovation...just rehashed old ideas. Why hasn't SEA improved the crunching efficiency of ARC? The CP/M world has had Steven Greenberg's CRUNCH program for several years now. It consistantly makes smaller files than SEA's ARC. He has published his methods of improving the LZW crunching efficiency in the doc files that are distributed with his program - free to all downloaders. Phil Katz's PKARC is far more efficient (and five times faster) than SEA's ARC. Why hasn't SEA coded some of their routines in MASM to improve the speed? --Keith Petersen Maintainer of the CP/M and MSDOS archives at SIMTEL20.ARPA [26.0.0.74] Arpa: W8SDZ@SIMTEL20.ARPA Uucp: {decwrl,harvard,lll-crg,ucbvax,uunet,uw-beaver}!simtel20.arpa!w8sdz GEnie: W8SDZ
tes@whutt.UUCP (STERKEL) (06/20/88)
[Mr. Petersen sent me his reply via email, but used that still-glitchy "domain" addressing and my reply got bounced. Then I noticed that his reply was cross-posted to this newsgroup, solving my problem of how to respond......] However, SEA was the *originator* of the "format" of such compression when applied to the PC world. Phil Katz remains a me-to developer. I stand firm on the ethics and necessity of protecting the originator...who wants to become the next Visicalc? P.S. configure files are a pain to maintain, I contend that the default is *for* incompatibility. If Mr. Katz *really* cared about compatibility, he would default to the SEA-standard without a "configure" file. P.S.S. I may have been wrong in assuming that SEA's acknowledgement of the originators of the technique indicated proper approval from the commercial rights holder. Humm, I wonder about UNIX(r) compress. In any case, I fail to see how a potential (unproven) ethics failure by SEA in any way allows a third party to do the same to SEA. (There is a Latin term rattling around in the empty spaces of my cranium that defines this type of logic error...oh well) P.S.S.S. At the risk of heaping fuel to the fire...I use Vernon Buerg's ARC* S/W. There are no ethic problems as the documentation I received encourages payment to SEA, and there are no performance problems as it is scrupulously follows SEA-standard, and is fast.
mdf@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Mark D. Freeman) (06/22/88)
In <3328@whutt.UUCP> tes@whutt.UUCP (STERKEL) writes: >After com- >municating with Mr. Katz on a compatibility problem between >PK* and Fansi-console, I dropped use of his software I made the opposite choice. Since FANSI conflicted with dozens of programs, I dropped it and am still using all those programs, including PKARC. -- Mark D. Freeman (614) 262-1418 Applications Programmer, CompuServe mdf@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu [70003,4277] ...!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mdf Columbus, OH Guest account at The Ohio State University