51–60 of 68 posts
these days, every time a startup reaches an IPO, we get a movie, book or long series of articles. we learn the guys revolutionizing social media are total basketcases
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> I know that seems strange these days, but back then a lot of software was distributed in source What is old is new again
You know what's peculiar? Thom Henderson wrote that after Katz's death in 2000. At what point in the last thirteen years would anyone think that distributing source code is strange?
Katz talked freer, laughed harder, stayed up longer and dreamed bigger when he had a drink in his hand, friends say. Drinking brought a painfully shy man out of his shell. I wonder if alcohol served him as an unfortunate remedy for his introverted person. And on unrelated note: He got real good at optimizing programs, and he learned to get the job done with the least amount of instructions and running times. I like t…
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> So now Phil Katz is dead. He drank himself to death, alone in a motel room, a bottle of booze in his hand and five empties in the room. One 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. > I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement: > "If you fail to abide by…
I'm honestly not sure how you can equivocate a haunted conscience with death.
This story might be a bit biased in favor of Katz. Read this take, too: http://www.esva.net/~thom/baker.html The team that owned ARC was even smaller than Katz's, and PKARC was based directly on ARC.
Whoa this line really stands out from the end of Thom Henderson's (creator of ARC) take on Phil's death: I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement: "If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life." (Apparently PKARC was blatantly ripped off of ARC and Phil refused to license ARC.)
Reading this sounds like a hit piece. I don't doubt he drank himself to death. There is an embellishment of events and the author is writing from the perspective as though they/he/she were there. I am writing this after coming back from the bar with friends. I would actually consider myself someone who drinks too much. I have written code for years, tried and failed on over four startups. I have spent a week in a hos…
Nobody is criticizing him and the article most definitely doesn't read "like a hit piece". At least that's not what I got from it, I thought it was very compassionate actually. Sorry about your problems... I can't say I know what you're talking about because I only had a glimpse of depression, but I understand the feeling of knowing your life isn't going to get better EVER and should preferably end right now. Thankfu…
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I'm honestly not sure how you can equivocate a haunted conscience with death.
It wasn't that part that struck me - obviously he wrote the copyright statement long before. What bothered me was "...it is a fitting demise...".
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I remember all three formats. You have to keep in mind the context of the times; there was no Linux yet, almost no one had heard of the internet, and certainly there were no things like the world wide web or wikipedia. No one really knew about open source or the legal fight between SEA and PKWARE. We all switched to PKZIP because it created the same size archive files as ARC and it uncompressed so much faster. In 198…
Wow. The memories. I ran the hub for a CAD/CAM and animation themed BBS network. We would switch to the latest, greatest (e.g. PKPAK) almost immediately to reduce phone bills.
An interesting point of view I found via Google: http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html
This: "In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988. Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it. " is contradicted by this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz "... settlement of the lawsuit…