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Does anyone remember the legal battles with Software Enhancements Associates' (SEA) ARC compression program and Phil Katz and his PKARC program in the early days of personal computers? SEA released ARC as shareware and even released the C source code. Phil Katz copied ARC and converted the compression routines from C to optimised assembler code, which made it much faster. SEA initially tried to license Katz's archiver, called PKARC, but Katz refused. SEA then sued Katz for copyright infringement and won. During settlement, Katz still refused to license PKARC to SEA, instead agreeing to pay SEA's legal fees and stop selling PKARC. He then went on to create his own file format PKZIP, and the .ZIP format he designed was a much more efficient compression format than .ARC. Once PKZIP was released, many users abandoned PKARC because of its slower performance and because they were convinced that Katz was the "good guy" being unfairly treated by an evil corporation. Phil placed the format, the compression algorithms, and the ZIP extension into the public domain in 1989. System operators quickly replaced virtually all ARC files with ZIP files as a show of support for Phil. PKZIP lives on. The ZIP format he invented is literally everywhere. Phil's company, PKWare, has grown up. It has become another successful software company with a board of directors and a long-term marketing plan. Software Enhancements Associates and ARC are now no more than a few paragraphs in the personal computer history books. The success of PKWare and the eventual failure of SEA was not decided by the courts, but rather by the little guy; the paying customer. MTH should take note. You may win the battle but in the end you will lose the war.
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