Thursday, September 01, 2005

Phil Katz and arc wars

There are many compression utility and format available, eg. zip, arj, lha, rar, Z(unix compress), gz, bz2. The most commonly seen now is zip (windows), gz or bz2 (for unix platform).

I read this interesting article name arc wars, SEA (System Enhancement Associates) sue PKWARE (PK is Phil Katz) for copied ARC's program code and violated on using the name ARC. Since Katz's code (from PKWARE) is much more faster than SEA's ARC program, SEA is not happy with it.

The result is obvious, costly legal suit hurt them both, financially and reputation. Phil Katz release a new compression format Zip, which was widely used until today.

Phil Katz died in year 2000 at age of 37.

phil w. katz

link:
arc wars from hacker dictionary.
A story by Thom Henderson, of SEA company.
A smaller world.

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