ARC was not free software. The decompressor was free as in beer. None of it was free as in speech. It was copyrighted code. That’s why SEA sued when Katz took it.
You do understand the difference between open and closed source, right? You understand why we have an entire body of law around the concept of clean-room reverse engineering? Maybe read the history of Franklin Computer, VTech’s Laser 128, and Compaq if you need a refresher on what doing this legally and illegally looks like in different scenarios.
The cleanroom method is almost by definition incompatible with the “lone hacker” or “small tightknit community” scratching an itch-- you need two teams that don’t communicate, except on the most formal of terms.
Katz’s activities predated Linux, and the widespread knowledge of GNU, so yea, it’s completely plausible that he was in it solely for the money.
Heck, I’m going through the pain of rewriting from the ground up some quite complicated, very low-level, stuff for my personal use*.
Why? just because I don’t like the license (GPL3) of the original and it would force me to release the rest of my code under it (instead of BSD-3).
Not that anyone is going to see it anytime soon…
Not really a cleanroom - there is no need here - but the code is radically different.
For the morbidly curious, it’s a debug stub for GDB running on a somewhat debug impaired MCU.
Yes, people cared. A lot. Both small operations who were hanging on by their fingernails, and very large places like Computer Associates, who patented everything they possibly could, and were famously litigious about anything even slightly resembling their products.
Does the hacker ethic include turning around and selling what you took as proprietary software?
And standing up for corporations wasn’t a thing.
But both players in this are corporations of comparable size and both were in it for the money. Yet somehow the one who gave people more freebies gets turned into some kind of nerd Robin Hood.
Sounds more like human nature. Only a sucker pays for something when you can get it for free. I certainly didn’t and don’t think Phil Katz was Robin Hood. And I don’t know anyone who sent him any money for his freeware.
I don’t think anyone blames end users, most of whom weren’t following the story anyway, too much for using the software. What I don’t get is the need to glorify any of this. Katz did not do a noble thing or even a particularly impressive thing. Through an accident of history the format he created to weasel out of the ARC settlement outlasted him and his software.
SEA cared. That’s why they sued, as was their right.
SEA and Katz were both one man operations. There was no David and no Goliath. There was one guy who innovated and deserved to be paid for it, and one guy who was a dick and got rich anyway.
Profiting from the works of others is not any hacker ethic I’ve ever heard of. Modifying and enjoying for personal use and maybe some friends? Sure. Selling for millions of dollars? Not so much.
The hacker ethic absolutely isn’t taking someone else’s published code, claiming it’s yours, and charging people for it. It never has been. It never will be.
MAYBE if he did this, and released it for free despite SEA trying to charge for it, we’d be in a different boat, but he took something that wasn’t his, claimed it was his, and then became a faceless , souless ghoul by selling it. He’s the exact opposite of the hacker ethic. If Microsoft took the code and did this to SEA people’d be screaming so hard fidonet would have shattered into pieces.
The hacker ethic and manifesto propose that all software is free, so published or not, it’s supposed to be open and available for the betterment of humanity. You can’t own an algorithm.
The hacker ethic is also all about doing neat tricks to achieve elegant results. Taking someone else’s code and rewriting it to make it more efficient is the dictionary definition of a hack.
From what histories and biographies I could find tonight, none of them indicate that PK intended to make money for the compression algorithm, but that he put it out there and suddenly major corporations just started throwing money at him, and he couldn’t refuse. None of the articles I could find had anything at all to say about SEA, though some did mention that he quit from an unnamed company, claiming that he wasn’t appreciated. Was that SEA?
Anyway, if nothing else, this is certainly a cautionary tale, because despite the fame and the ill-gotten booty, it sure doesn’t seem to have helped him overcome any of his inner demons in the end.
Edit: This page seems to indicate that SEA didn’t sue PK over stolen code but over the use of the word “ARC” in the name?
one interpretation is that Katz embraced and extended the arc standard— he took a marginally effective compression scheme that sea’s arc utility was not able to understand, and began seeding incompatible .arc files all over fidonet, so as to encourage his product over the original. That scheme might generate a very plausible trademark complaint, but shorn of this detail sounds very silly indeed.
as for the speed improvements— hand crafted assembly code is one thing, a marginally more effective compiler combined with dramatically fewer error checks is quite another.
Much of the evidence for the perfidiousness of Katz or lack of same remains under seal. SEA’s Arc utilities have been released under a more permissive licence, but I have not located the version with the orthographically challenged source code.
It’s not quite that simple. Initially, ARC’s source code was openly available on a BBS system run by SEA itself, and was downloaded by many people, not just Katz. Only later did SEA decide to make it a proprietary closed product. Saying Katz “stole” the code implies he was some nefarious hacker who secretly broke in to SEA’s servers or something, rather than just being an early user of ARC before it turned proprietary.
And in the end the who ARC story is kind of irrelevant because ZIP isn’t based on ARC. Katz made PKZIP in order to resolve the whole issue by creating a new format that SEA couldn’t complain about. And to his credit he documented the format and openly welcomed competing programs that used the format. And thus the format is still used today despite the death of Katz.
They shared the code. That does not give up their copyright on it and they never agreed anyone could make a competing commercial product with it. Leaving your door unlocked does not make burglary legal.
As soon as he sold someone else’s code as his own product (complete with their comment typos still in it) it became theft. This is not a legal gray area.
I didn’t say it was. I said he made a lot of money on PKARC, which he did, which was largely stolen code, which it was. I said he then dodged legal consequences because the BBS community pressured SEA, which they did.
Everyone wants to play semantic games and argue straw men to defend Katz, but the facts of this are pretty simple, and the toxic manbaby culture got their way. Much like they may do in this thread if I get tired of making the same points over and over that everyone is ignoring because for some reason they want to dive in front of bullets for this guy.
I’m not familiar with this story, having just learned about it. In the downloadable version, did SEA’s source code have any kind of statement of license that allowed commercial redistribution in whole or in part with no royalties paid to SEA? I suspect not. And if not, the default position w.r.t. copyright in most jurisdictions is that it’s illegal to do what Katz did.
Reading the source code gives the reader no more rights to use and modify the code than I have to publish a lightly modified version of Twilight and let the royalties roll in.
It might be a terrible law, or a great one, but it’s definitely a law he must’ve known he was breaking.
I dunno, maybe my experience was unique but I was in some pretty underground places back in the day and while these places certainly had their share of toxicity it was nothing like the chan/kuns of today. Of course there were plenty of stupid arguments, gatekeeping, and “religious wars” about which thing was better than the other and nobody wanted to be a lamer, but it was mostly harmless. And of course given the largely young male demographic there was no shortage of the usual bullshit (and the more underground you got the worse it was), but most of the communities I was in were pretty inclusive. It was rare enough to find similarly nerdy people with a computer and a modem so turning away someone just because they were a girl, Black, brown, queer, trans, young, old, disabled, or (take your pick) wasn’t really the way to go.
The difference was that most BBSes were very local. The communities were small enough that it was rare that there was more than a couple degrees of separation between people. Most of us knew each other or knew someone that knew someone. It’s hard to be “internet tough” when the people you’re interacting with probably know who you are and can easily call you out on your bullshit. Yeah, there were some legit scary people I interacted with that were not to be fucked with, but mostly it was just geeky teenagers and young adults like I was. Less man, more baby.
