What the author of ARC thinks about Phil Katz | Hacker News Reader

What the author of ARC thinks about Phil Katz

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54 pointsd0mine25 comments

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!?"

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

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

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).

"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.

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.

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

http://books.google.com/books?id=JLpYAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA34...

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."

"Brides are always beautiful, babies are always cute, and the dead were always kind."

Personally, if my professional reputation were based on some kind of lie, I hope nobody does me the favor of pretending I was noble.

Generally the done thing in those cases is to simply not say anything at all, unless the person in question was some kind of notable who belongs in a history book, which isn't really the case here.

If I were thinking about embarking on some moderately sleazy career path, the thought of being remembered that way might put me off.

I don't understand why people care how they will be remembered.

In a purely selfish mindset, think of your heirs. I assume you care about them? It negatively impacts their happiness and wellbeing (acceptance by peers) if you happen to ben a truly-reviled human being.

Ok, rephrased, I don't know why people guide their lives according to any criteria that obtain after they are dead.

Life is a work of art. I want mine to be beautiful.

Life is a pizza. I want mine to be pepperoni.

Strictly speaking, I agree with you. I ultimately don't care how I'll be remembered since I'll be dead, but life itself is much more fun when you aren't hated while living it, at least not by too many people. Also, for those people with a conscience, just the personal knowledge that one's success is "based on a lie" might well be enough to sour the flavor of that success.

From what I've read, there's no evidence that Katz drank himself to death because he was overwrought with guilt caused by "stealing" ARC. I feel that if someone takes an existing program and re-writes it entirely in a more difficult language and creates very tangible improvements to it, it's not simple theft. Almost nothing is that black and white.

Katz was, apparently, a guy with no friends who spent most of his time with strippers. I would probably drink a lot, too.

You can't hurt the feelings of the dead. I would sooner speak ill of a dead person than (an equally deserving) living person, for multiple reasons, first among them being that people can and do change.

The dead can't defend themselves. We only here Thom Henderson's side here.

Roll for Initiative: advance straight to Godwin's Law.

Let us never speak ill of Hitler ever again.

If we had known he was going to commit suicide, I don't think we would have pushed him so hard.

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

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

Good to know both sides of the story

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