Pkware net worth
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(PKARC was, IIRC, based on ARC 5.)īen Baker has a description of the history of this whole affair at the website of Thom Henderson (ARC's author). ZIP did end up with an improved compression scheme which I presume PKWare came up with, although there's some evidence that the all-but-ignored ARC 7 outperformed it. Katz baldly abused this license and, in the end, got away with it. ARC was a commercial program, but had a very unusual license (for the time) allowing people free access to the source code if they wanted to port it to non-DOS platforms.
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The reality is also that even then, PKWare was a bigger company than SEA ever was. That always gets left out of the retelling, even though the reason ZIP exists as a format is because Katz was ultimately prevented from using the ARC format and compression routine. They won the lawsuit because Katz hadn't just reimplemented ARC, he stole their source code. It ruined System Enhancement Associates.Įxcept the funny thing is, SEA was right.
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BBS sysops were encouraged to boycott ARC.
PKWARE NET WORTH SOFTWARE
To me this move just screams "Use our patented technology to secure your important files.BTW you must use only our software and we can revoke your rights to use our patent at any time rendering your important files so secure that not even you can read them legally again!" That's enough to keep me from using their format it's my data and I don't want my access to it to be contingent upon some party outside of my control.Įxcept that they started out in hell, because their founder ripped off Thom Henderson's ARC to make his original program.īack in the BBS days, we were all rallied to support good ol' Phil against the evil Big Company, System Enhancement Associates, who was suing to keep Phil's faster PKARC from eating the original ARC program's lunch. In the late 1990s companies looked for VC firms to save them from their own shortcomings, today the trendy savior seems to be the USPTO. Adding a patent in this area to me seems like a dumb move another one of those all-to-common desparation moves by a failing company to have the USPTO save it.
PKWARE NET WORTH ARCHIVE
As an archive format it is pretty uninteresting. Seriously, the true value of their intellectual "property" (sic) is that of their trademarked brand name. What's an extension? I use Content-Types like application/x-patented-zip and name all my Zip(TM) files ".not.tar", and when I am forced to use Windows I never see an "extension".