Programmer 7500/MAX_PROGRAMMERS.iso/PROGRAMS/UTILS/COMPRESS/ARCWARS.ZIP/ARCWARS

Text File | 1989-07-27 | 26.6 KB | 529 lines

                             ArcWars

           Compiled by Richard Daggett & Nancy Woolford

In the past several months we have come across an appalling amount
of verbiage concerning the litigation between SEA and PKARC. Very
few, if any, of the 60 or more User Group newsletters we regularly
read have not had something to say. The more we read the more it
became less clear what the good guy bad guy roles were. The one
thing that is patently obvious is that for many this is mostly a
gut issue. We would suppose that this emotionalism stems from the
fact that this battle is from within the shareware family. Hence
it takes on the aura of any civil war and the resulting
internecine conflict.

A very real concern here is that the BBS users are taking it in
the chops by losing (having lost?) a standard in communications.
But incompatibility was to be inevitable as a result of the
settlement between SEA and Phil Katz:

Royalties: PK agrees to account monthly and pay to SEA a royalty
fee of 6.5% (six and one half percent) of all revenue received for
ARC compatible programs on all orders received after the effective
date of this Agreement, such revenue including any license fees or
shareware registrations received after January 31, 1989, for ARC
compatible programs. [reprinted in part from a the Greater
Victoria PCUG newsletter].

And this is between the little guys who can't, supposedly, feed
the legal industry. What will be the state of standardization when
the big fellas get through with the look and feel wars  LOFEEWAR
for short.

Like it or not you, the user, have been dragged into this morass,
and you are the ones who are going to have to make some
significant decisions.

What follows are four diverse commentaries and one letter, by a
principle, concerning the Archiving Battle  ARCBAT for short.

                          Share Wars II

        by Tony Barcellos of the Sacramento PC Users Group
                  via the Palmetto PC User Group

                     The Empire Strikes Back

System Enhancement Associates (SEA) slapped PKWare with a contempt
of court charge based on PKWare's continued use of the words
archive and archiving in the documentation of his renamed PKPAK
and PKUNPAK. Apparently, SEA thinks they own the words as well as
the process  or believe they have sufficient legal muscle to shut
Phil Katz down completely. This time they blew it.

SEA originally sued Phil Katz of PKWare for infringing on their
archiving program. Part of their claim was that PKARC had the look
and feel of ARC and that Katz had copied ARC code in PKARC and
PKXARC programs. Katz agreed to a settlement relinquishing the
right to market his software after January 1989, to cease using
the term ARC and to a press release stating that SEA and PKWare
would not disclose any details other than those in the joint
release. PKWare renamed the products using PAK to replace ARC.

However, the secret papers were filed as public documents in
Wisconsin and are now making the rounds via bulletin boards and
electronic mail. They contain nothing substantiating pirated code!
SEA's size and legal power that forced the issue  not legitimacy
of SEA's claim.

The facts are that both programs drew their compression techniques
from public domain algorithms that anyone is free to implement.
SEA's famous ARC was sluggish and over priced compared to PKWare's
supercharged PKARC and PKXARC, and was rapidly loosing market
share.

SEA's continued attacks on PKWare and attempts to lock up all
aspects of archiving has set off a considerable backlash in the PC
community. Electronic petitions are circulating in protest of
SEA's legal maneuvering, SEA products are being scrubbed from
bulletin boards and ARC deleted from software libraries. SEA
forgot one thing when trying to acquire the PC community as its
empire. The Empire strikes back!

                         The New Software

              from the Greater Victoria PCUG, Edited

February has come, and Phil Katz (PKWARE) has brought out his new
archiving utility, ZIP version 0.90. Meanwhile System Enhancement
Associates (SEA) has released ARC version 6.00. Now everyone is
running benchmarks and making comparisons. Definitive
pronouncements of the technical aspects of their relative
performance I leave to others, I will, however, make some general
observations.

ZIP is an interesting program produced by a talented programmer.
It operates at a speed equivalent to that of PKARC but the data
files it generates have returned to a central directory format. It
was to escape the restrictions of a central directory that the ARC
format was invented in the first place. Compression was an
afterthought, not being introduced until version 2 of SEA ARC. ZIP
does have one very interesting capability which is not implemented
in the present version, that of creating multidisk ZIP files. If
Phil Katz can successfully implement it, he will have a good
product.

For the present, however, the program is in beta release and may
contain bugs as did PKARC versions 3.5 and 3.60. It would not be
advisable to use it on data that really counts, such as hard disk
backups and the like until it is proven.

SEA ARC version 6.0 is more than twice as fast as 5.22 and
produces files in an utterly reliable format. In addition, there
are other utilities such as ZOO, DWC, PAK and whatnot else. Some
of these have capacities which make then viable for particular
uses. Much can be said about all this, but it can wait till later.

                           The Lawsuit

The SEA  PKWARE lawsuit is the first lawsuit between two purveyors
of Shareware. It has upset a lot of people, largely because it was
so completely unnecessary. That aside, it is a tribute to the many
people who have participated in the production and distribution of
Shareware over the last six years here in North America that this
is the first such lawsuit. In the highly litigatious North
American business environment, that is a notable accomplishment.

The result of the lawsuit, messy as it was, is unequivocal.

Many, many statements have emanated from members of the Katz camp
ever since the inception of this action. They have stirred people
up and caused no end of trouble. I believe that the people issuing
these statements are well intended, but misguided and that the
person responsible for the misguiding is Phil Katz. He has not
dealt honestly with SEA, nor with the user community. In all
probability, he has not dealt honestly with his immediate
associates either.

A prominent spokesperson for PK is Karen Little, the lady who
writes its documentation. She is responsible for publishing the
Confidential Cross License Agreement which she found so at
variance with her understanding of the situation, an understanding
established on the word of Phil Katz. A second spokesperson for
Phil is Judy Getts, contributing communications editor to PC World
magazine, who has used her editorial platform to rail against SEA
without informing her readers that she is a part time PKWARE
employee. These people and others have swamped the North American
computer networks with messages excoriating SEA.

The situation finally degenerated to the point where last fall
when Thom Henderson of SEA made a statement for the record about
the lawsuit. It is a lengthy statement, designed to answer many of
the questions raised throughout. [See below letter by Thom
Henderson : Now that it's over, what did it mean?. via the
Palmetto UG  Eds.]

Henderson should not have agreed to terms that the settlement be
kept under court seal. The muzzling of the action and suppression
of the relevant information enabled Phil Katz to circulate a
blizzard of insinuation and innuendo calculated to discredit Thom
Henderson and SEA. The snow has yet to stop falling. It would be
too much to shovel through the drifts and describe all the flakes.

The blizzard hit suddenly and hard, so that only 10 days after the
settlement, SEA was back before the court asking for relief. PK
had released another version of its software, this time called
PKPAK, and SEA argued that its documentation did not conform to
the terms of the settlement. I understand that the court agreed
and found PK in contempt. The point at issue was the use of the
tradename ARC.

It is likely that at the time Ms Little wrote the PKPAK
documentation which was the point of contention she was unaware of
terms of the settlement. The contempt action was brought on Aug
11th and by her own statement, she did not obtain her copy of the
Confidential Agreement until August 31 which she writes came as a
complete surprise to me. One can only conclude that Phil Katz had
failed to direct his employees to act in accordance with the
settlement he had just made.

Through it all, one thing is clear. Phil Katz is a thief. The fact
that he improved upon the software he stole, as he assuredly did,
does not alter the fact. People steal cars all the time and give
them new paint jobs and maybe even soup them up so they go faster,
but they're still hot cars. If you have one, you have received
stolen property.

Katz had his opportunity to explain his position in court, but
balked. He succeeded in suppressing public dissemination of the
court proceedings and then through second and third parties took
his case before the court of public opinion in as tendentious and
mendacious a manner as can be imagined. Throughout he has tried to
pass himself off as a small man being victimized by a large
corporate entity. [Again see below letter by Thom Henderson  Eds.]

                        The ZIP Dedication

In view of how the whole situation has developed, I doubt that we
have heard the last from Phil Katz. The latest snow shower in in
his release of ZIP. Accompanying the package is the following
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 inconnection 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.

I suspect this dedication was drafted by Mr. Katz himself and not
by a lawyer.

It leaves two matters glaringly open. First, what does Phil mean
by generally compatible? Most especially, what does he intend to
do if someone produces and aggressively markets a program he does
not think generally compatible with his but which generates files
with a .ZIP extension?

Secondly, someone should tell Phil that he does not have the right
to dedicate anything to the public domain. All he can do is
renounce his own rights to it. If he chooses to do that, someone
else can come along and claim them. Me, for instance. This game
has already been played out in the attachment of 'Freeware' by
Andrew Fluegleman and 'PCDOS' by DEC. Consequently, we have
something called Shareware and an IBM Corporation which cannot
legally market its operating system under its common semantic
designation.

As we have now become aware, the dispute over the tradename ARC
between SEA and PKWARE may be moot. ARC is a registered trademark
of DATAPOINT. It stands for Attached Resource Computer which is a
combination hardware software device used with Datapoint's ARCNET
system. Datapoint has had the rights on the three letter
combination since the 1970's, years before anyone even thought of
distributed directory data files. Phil should stick to doing what
he does best, programming computers, and delegate ancillary
matters to more knowledgeable people. In October of last year, I
finished an article on the SEA  PKWARE lawsuit with the sentence:
I cannot help thinking that this entire imbroglio could have been
avoided if he [Katz] had extended a few simple courtesies to
deserving parties  and utilized the services of a competent
business manager. The statement still stands.

              Now That It's Over, What Did It Mean?

    by Thom Henderson, President System Enhancement Associates
                  via the Palmetto PC User Group

Now that the dust has settled in the first shareware copyright
case, it is time for SEA to make public the facts that many
members of the shareware community deserve to know.

For the record, SEA is a family owned business. Andy Foray, the
company chairman, and Thom Henderson, the company president, are
brothers in law. Irene Henderson, the secretary/treasurer and
office manager, is Andy's sister and Thom's wife.

As the creators, publishers and defenders of the industry standard
ARC file compression format, we have always maintained a strong
belief in a fundamental concept of shareware  that shareware be
distributed for free for all noncommercial use. To this end, we
have never, and will never, charge for the use of ARC in a
noncommercial environment. We also believe that full program
sources should be available, at least to registered users, and we
have always made the full ARC sources available to all users. We
have also licensed a great many people to use the ARC sources in
their own programs.

We discovered that PKWARE had obtained our source code without
obtaining a license. He modified that code so that the program ran
faster and provided several other enhancements. However, the nuts
and bolts of the program were done by SEA. That is called piracy,
plain and simple. And this industry has no place for pirates. We
tried to politely ask PKWARE to obtain a license. He ingraciously
told us where to go.

We asked our lawyer what we should do. He said we were bound by
law to protect our rights to the trademark and copyrights on ARC.
If we did not, then anyone could use the ARC trademark and
copyrights. It is very much like a candy bar calling itself
Hershey. If another company used the Hershey name without
permission, you can imagine what would happen.

Also, it should be noted that PKWARE did not live up to the high
standards set by the shareware industry. He didn't make his source
code available. He sought out our market and competed directly for
our corporate market by using the funds he had received from
noncommercial users (whom we would not charge!) He authorized ads
with false and misleading comparison statements to run in the
magazines we advertised in. And he placed those ads on the same
pages as our ads. If we did not protect our investment in the ARC
trademark, we would have lost our trademark, our market and our
business. Furthermore, the industry would have been left in
disarray, as two standards would have emerged.

So after Phil Katz told us he would not settle this case like a
gentleman, we were forced to ask the courts to settle it for us.
We didn't want to go to court. We couldn't afford the lawyers
fees. We couldn't afford the time away from programming the
updated versions of ARC that will work on other systems, such as
Unix, Macintosh, and VM/CMS. And we couldn't afford to create a
controversy in an industry that we helped to pioneer. We also
couldn't afford to create ill will among users both our users and
PKWARE users. But PKware left us no choice.

Anyway, the case didn't get very far, thanks to the testimony of
an expert witness, John Navas. He looked at the source code of
both programs and found, lo and behold, that the PKWARE program
was indeed a blatant copy of the SEA code. When Katz heard this,
he called us directly bypassing the attorneys and said he wanted
to settle.

We were only too happy to put a quick end to this. We wanted the
facts to come out. Unfortunately, Katz demanded that part of the
settlement terms be kept under court seal. We agreed, and we
probably should not have, but we did because we wanted to end the
case quickly so we could get back to updating and improving ARC.
Some of the terms are public: PKWARE cannot distribute the program
after January 1, 1989, they cannot substantially change the
program (though they can make bug fixes) and if they receive
inquiries for the product, they must send out SEA literature.
Also, PKWARE is prohibited from creating a new program that is
compatible with ARC or PKARC.

If those terms sound one-sided, then it only goes to prove the
extent to which PKWARE felt that it had no legitimate right to its
program. After all, why would he give up everything if he was
right? He obviously was not above board in this case, even though
the settlement terms said he was not admitting fault in any way (a
standard legalese ploy).

We are a bit perturbed that one of PKWARE's part-time employees
obtained a copy of the sealed court document, typed it into a file
along with numerous typos and loaded it onto several bulletin
board systems. She also included her own biased, editorial opinion
on the case and its terms. While we don't believe PKWARE had
authorized this action, it obviously violates the sense of fair
play that we have lived with, at Mr. Katz' request. Now we are
faced with several problems.

The bulletin board community has heard many comments by people who
did not possess the facts of this case, and therefore made ill
informed opinions. Those opinions seemed like fact because we did
not respond to them while the case was in progress. You are well
aware that no party in a legal action can really speak his mind
while the action is occurring. Because we didn't respond, people
assumed that we were wrong. Well, we weren't wrong and we won't be
silent any more. We have begun responding to the outrageous and
outlandish opinions expressed against SEA. We realize that people
came to the only conclusion possible, given the lack of reliable
information about this case.

We will respond to any and every comment about this case.We
welcome questions and urge people to call us at our office. When
the dust settles, no one will doubt our sincerity in trying to do
the right thing.

We'd also like to clear up a few basic misconceptions that have
appeared on the boards:

SEA waited too long to take action.Response: The legal world moves
slowly. First we have to be aware of the situation, determine that
a violation of our copyright existed, try to settle amicably and
then take legal action. That takes time.

SEA doesn't upgrade it's program.Response: We have updated the
program nine times in three years. We have made it available for
several other operating systems, such as OS/2 and CP/M. We will
continue to upgrade the program to benefit all users on all
systems.

SEA used the courts when it realized it couldn't compete on raw
programming talent.Response: We have a very good program and one
that is getting better. We wouldn't be the defenders of an
industry standard if we didn't have programming talent to begin
with.

SEA is a Goliath pursuing a David called Phil Katz.Response: Phil
Katz is a not just a person. He is a company, and a big one at
that. PKWARE is a bigger company than SEA, despite the fact we
publish four programs. We calculate that PKware currently grosses
almost $2,000 a day, or about five times what we do. We challenge
him to make his audited figures public.

PKWARE must be a small company because we hear there are only
three employees including his mother.Response: We applaud Mrs.
Katz and wish her the best of success. We too are a family run
company. Andy Foray and Thom Henderson are brothers in law and
Irene Henderson serves as secretary/treasurer. We have hired a
programmer and a license manager. We didn't do this because we had
a windfall profit, we did this because we needed to stay
competitive and to serve new markets.

SEA should have pursued the case to a jury trial so a precedent
could be set for the industry.Response: We wish we had the money
to support our lawyer to take this case to a jury trial
conclusion. However, we were eating hot dogs every night and had
to take on outside consulting jobs to make ends meet. We needed to
end this case before the legal fees devoured our company. Besides,
we weren't out to crucify the guy we just wanted him to stop
stealing our work.

If there are more questions, be assured, we will respond to them.
We have also issued a new policy statement regarding the licensing
of ARC. It has been uploaded to the IBMSW forum on CompuServe, the
utilities/archivers conference on BIX, and has been disseminated
to other BBSs as well. The terms probably are the most liberal for
any licensing policy for any software company. And if that isn't
enough, give us a call and we'll see what we can work out. We
welcome the opportunity to better serve the shareware community.
We invite your comments and your suggestions.

                            Archiving

         by Dex Hart of the Miami PC Users Group, Edited

I wrote on archiving utilities in both July and August 1988 and
here we go again. Really, it's not that I'm fixated on archiving,
it's just that there are some big changes happening you should
know about. Recall that archiving means to clump multiple files
into one, while also condensing the total combined size to 1/2 or
2/3 of the original size; convenient for downloading multiple file
programs, while also minimizing download time. Archived files are
identified by the .ARC extension (long, long ago, an older format
used the extension .LBR, for library).

ARC files were introduced by SEA (Systems Enhancement Associates),
but a guy named Phil Katz improved and speeded up archiving
utilities to the point where his PKARC and PKXARC were the
dominant archiving programs in use. It seems SEA had a patent,
however, and sued. Katz quit using the term arc, and called his
newer versions PKPAK and PKUNPAK but they were still compatible
with older ARC files. If I've got the story right, it seems SEA
wasn't too happy with the new versions either, but wanted Katz to
quit offering programs compatible with ARC files. Katz signed up
to this restriction.

Thus was born ZIP. We now have PKZIP and PKUNZIP to archive (I
can't think of a better word) and unarchive files. But they won't
work on ARC files. You might say, who needs this? Just keep using
the old PKARC versions, right? Absolutely. There's only one fly in
that ointment all the bulletin boards are converting to ZIP files,
often overnight. It seems that most of the SysOps like Katz (a
lot). And are not overfond of SEA. All together now, you SysOps
... aim in the direction of SEA and place thumb to nose, ZIP it
is.

Utilities have appeared overnight (wonder who wrote them?) that
convert all ARC files to ZIP files. No, ARC and ZIP aren't
compatible, but for such an easy conversion the changes can't be
great. I suspect the differences are mostly in the file header,
but it doesn't matter. Like it or not, we now have to contend with
both types of archiving.

For your personal use, continue to use ARC. Phil Katz' latest
self-splitting file will be on our BBS [Note: This is Miami
speaking  Ed.] Filename: PKX35A35.EXE (last ARC version) or
PK36.EXE (PAK version, compatible with ARC). Phil Katz' new ZIP
self-splitter (latest version as it is written): PKZ090.EXE.

The host of auxiliary programs which formed front ends to Katz'
programs have been or probably will be rewritten to accommodate
ZIP.

Arc Master has already responded; SHARC and others probably will
follow. Neat freestanding programs like NARC will probably
accommodate both file types (unless the author of NARC gets sued).
Overall, this is just a minor irritation we have to get used to.
We didn't need it, but there's no escaping the fact we now have
two primary types of archived files. At the rate ZIP is taking
over, however, there soon may be only one type. If that turns out
to be the case, then court decisions notwithstanding, SEA lost and
Phil Katz won. And users add another small increase in complexity
to their lives.

Interesting stuff, but a tip: Keep your PK ARC type programs and
get your hands on a copy of the PK ZIP programs. You'll need both
(at least for a while) and most of us probably won't ever need
anything beyond these two programs.

                       No PKARCing at UCLA

            by Peter Chow, President, UCLA User Group

           The SEA PKWare Saga or the battle of ARChive

A little more than four years ago, there was a utility that
performed file compression for the purpose of archiving a large
body of information. Bulletin Board Systems across the country
embraced this utility with great enthusiasm and, soon afterward,
it became the de facto standard. The company, because of marketing
reasons, made the source code for the product available to the
public with a notice allowing others to use it with only prior
notification to the company. (The relevant algorithms had been
placed previously in the public domain by their respective
authors.) Grass root support for this product widened. Users were
comfortable with its usage. Many commercial companies licensed it
for distribution purposes. The utility to which I am referring is,
of course, ARC, produced by Systems Enhancement Associate (SEA).
In its infancy, it was a product with many problems, so that fixes
and enhancements were made to it frequently. In 1986, another
company PKWare, produced a competing product: PKARC/PKXARC. It was
a significant improvement over ARC (from SEA) in many ways. In
mid-1988, SEA initiated legal actions against PKWare citing the
look and feel issue and copyright infringement. What ever his
reasons were Phil Katz, the author and principal of PKWARE, opted
for an out of court settlement and agreed to stop distribution and
development of PKARC in January 1989. This has led to the creation
of five different compression program formats on the market at
this time, none of which is compatible with any of the others. In
other words, the direct effect of the SEA action has been that the
de facto standard no longer exists.

Because of my feelings toward look and feel lawsuits, as well as
other specifics concerning the litigation, the East and West UCLA
PC UG BBSs will no longer support the SEA ARC format. By mid-March
(or sooner), all ARC files on both BBSs will be converted to Phil
Katz's new format: PKZIP/PKUNZIP. This format is not, repeat not,
compatible with PKARC/PKXARC. BBS users must, therefore, do the
following: first, download PKZ090.EXE to unarchive any ZIPped
files (when you type PKZ090.EXE, the file will unzip itself);
second, be sure to keep a backup copy of PKARC/PKXARC available in
the event you need to unarchive a previously ARCed file.