Talk:PKZIP

Corrections

changed typo Keinitz to Katz and added comment about how Katz optimized for speed (hack) Jfricker 08:01, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Patents last only 20 years and cannot be renewed. Most patents with possible claims on the ZIP file format have expired. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.48.181.45 (talk) 17:02, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

POV

I will attest that PKWARE is indeed the world leader for compression and security on a Mainframe Platform.

Some of the statements within this article either need to be toned down or provide third party sources which validate claims such as "In the meantime PKWARE is the world leader for compression software on the Mainframe Platform."

I dispute the idea that it was a fight between a "'large, faceless corporation'" and "Katz was 'the little guy'" that angered the community. At least in my circles, this was never brought up. The perception was that Katz brought out a better product and SEA responded by suing rather than improving their product. It was alleged that SEA was claiming to own the ARC file extension. With no internet, it was much more difficult to seperate fact from rumor. After the settlement, there was a seasside.txt file that was circulated that purported to offer their side. The claim was that the PK offering was harming SEA's business plans; this did not really help their case with the community. It was never circulated that SEA's source code was used in the PK product.

[NOTE: I am very new to this forum and am making my very first contribution. If I have not followed proper etiquette this I apologize.] —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 70.248.173.168 (talk) 14:37, August 22, 2007 (UTC)

SEA/PK dispute

I also am rather new to Wikipedia participation. Apologies (and corrections requested) if I'm not following protocol.

I do have some objections and concerns about the ambiguous handling in this article of the SEA/PK dispute. There is a tone in the article of uncertainty about who did what to whom, and who was "right", despite clear and truthful assertions that Katz did in fact lift the ARC code for his commerical shareware product; that he did lose the lawsuit; that he did pay attorney's fees; and that the suit generally resolved in SEA's favor. This is certainly the way I recall events turning.

I would also like to address the preceding POV comments above, which share some of this same ambiguous quality, as if to say "This is the way I recall this obscure event from 20 years ago, but even back then we didn't quite have all the facts and we were of a faction supporting Katz."

My circumstances at the time were different and certainly "faction free". During the 80's I was an editor/manager and a writer with one of the major computer publications, and for whatever reasons I'd become familiar with Thom Henderson and SEA (and of course with ARC). I never met Phil Katz but had no feeling one way or the other about him or about PKARC. SEA ARC was the preferred file compression format for transfers over FidoNet (I sysop'ed a node), with PKARC coming into wider use, and I became of course more curious about the affair as the charges started going back and forth not so much amongst the principal players as among the "factions".

I finally asked to meet with Thom at his office (not too far away by car) to get a better understanding of the dispute. Firsthand source information was critical to clearing away the rumor and innuendo. I left after a few hours absolutely without any question of Thom's sincerity and honesty. This was to my knowledge the first, the clearest, and most egregious example of open source code (ARC) being lifted, copied, and refashioned as a commercial product.... without any permission or authorization from the originator. I also had sort of a sick feeling about the other party, as if someone without much of a conscience (but now making a lot of money) was clearly taking advantage of Thom's creative work and his generous intentions.

So here we are 20 years later with a Wikipedia article expressing ambiguity about a situation that was not at all ambiguous. The court ruled Phil Katz to be (let's not mince words on this) a code thief. Katz agreed to cease and desist. He paid all of the legal fees. The he turned right around to violate the clear intention of the agreement by renaming "his" product and selling it under a new name.

In the end, Phil Katz *did not* create PKZIP. He lifted the SEA code and made enhancements to it.

Therefore the entire thrust of this Wikipedia article is wrong.

Geeyore 14:03, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Just to put this lie to death: PKZIP was LAUNCHED with compression methods that ARC never supported, and file format structure that ARC never had. Calling that "enhancement" and not "invention" is slander. --Rpresser 13:23, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

On reflection, it occurred to me that (a) Thom Henderson and I met through FidoNet in 84/85 where Thom was a very active sysop and much more, while I was a slacker of a sysop, and (b) I have another concern about POV and its impact on the main article. In particular the implication (though not directly stated) that PKZIP was somehow an innovative and superior compression program because it was "split" in a compression program and a decompression program. In fact most of the preceding Unix utilities were single function (one compress/one decompress), and it was actually considered an innovation that SEA combined all functionality within the single ARC executable driven by CL switches. There are a few other statements that cause concern (e.g., why PKZIP was "faster").

Geeyore 16:34, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that PKZIP was incompatible with PKARC, and so is unlikely to have contained any SEA ARC code. If this is the case, any mention of the PKWARE/SEA dispute should really be placed in its own article (e.g. PKWARE, Inc.), not this one, because the dispute predated PKZIP. --ozzmosis 14:20, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

You are wrong. As the expert for SEA in the lawsuit, I found that the majority of the code used by Katz was lifted directly from copyrighted SEA ARC source code, even down to misspellings in comments. His only original work was in the replacement of a relatively small amount of core C code with hand-optimized assembler. This is why Katz lost the lawsuit, consenting to judgment in favor of SEA.

The incompatibility came later when Katz added a compression scheme that wasn't in ARC software, with the result that his software created .ARC files that were incompatible with ARC software, damaging the business of SEA. Katz wasn't just a thief, he was a malicious thief.

--John Navas (talk) 05:49, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Your statements apply to Katz's work on PKARC, not on PKZIP, which this article is about. PKZIP is unlikely to have contained any SEA ARC code. --Rpresser 14:19, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

---

Thom Henderson was mostly "right" on the code copyright issues, but he failed to derive any real lasting benefit from the lawsuit, because he was massively "wrong" when he tried to retroactively declare the ARC file format to be closed and proprietary, something which generated a huge negative backlash from users who weren't following the details of the SEA vs. PKWARE lawsuit too closely, but understood very well that SEA was claiming the right to decide which software would be allowed and not allowed to deal with ARC files in the future... AnonMoos (talk) 04:27, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Version

Is it still version 2.04g? _→AzaToth 18:56, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

You may be able to find the current version number on the PKWARE website. I think it's at least 7.2. --Zundark 22:35, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

On 03-01-1999 PKWARE released PKZIP 2.50 for DOS final. 83.5.74.70 17:21, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Please look here for proof of above statement. Wikinger 13:44, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

version 1.93a

Should mention the 1.93a beta, which was released in October 1991, about a year before 2.04g came out, and was the only way people could compress using "deflate" before the official 2.0 release. The release of deflate seems to have given ZIP the final momentum to become the prevailing MS-DOS compression format (before that time there were a number of competitors)... AnonMoos (talk) 04:29, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Performance

ZIP archives were once considered ubiquitous, but gradually have lost the meaning and have been largely replaced by other types of archive. That early popularity was result of tight code optimization, faster execution than any competing product and on average smaller archive. But what helped ZIP to the top, eventually brought it down. The shrinking user base was mainly result of losing performance, such as processing speed, inability to utilize or utilize efficiently other resources such as non-Intel CPUs, additional CPU cores, inability to produce spanned archives on HDD etc. For example PKZIP and later WinZip was eventually allowed creation of spanned archives on hard disk, however this was long after competing products did so. In practical terms this meant entire archive distributed over possibly dozens of slow media had to be created from scratch even if there was single problem with just one of them. Clearly main problem is unacceptable time involved to create archive as any removable media is slower than hard disc (Floppy, CDs etc.). Other archivers such as ARJ etc. allowed making entire archive of spanned volumes on hard disk which is faster and more reliable. Then each volume could be copied to one media disc at a time. Failure of one disc would simply mean need to copy just that one disc instead of making entire new archive disc by disc.

This entire paragraph needs work. I've removed it, and will work on it when I get the chance, it's garbled to the max, dude. a_man_alone (talk) 10:51, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

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