Talk:Thom Henderson

Merge?
Might as well merge to ARC (file format) if there's not much more to say about him than what's currently on the article... AnonMoos (talk) 14:31, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

"shareware license violated"...
I really doubt whether that's an accurate or useful summary of the whole (PK)ARC controversy. In fact, SEA claimed that PKWare violated copyrights on SEA-authored code, and the trademark rights connected with the ARC "brand". SEA achieved a partial and limited victory on these points in its court case -- but the effects of this legal victory were more than offset when SEA tried to retroactively declare the ARC file format to be closed and proprietary, so that no non-SEA programs would be allowed to handle ARC files, despite the facts that previously there had been no formal written policy about this, and SEA had openly winked at the existence of such ARC-compatible programs. This file format closing attempt turned out to be a complete public opinion fiasco among the BBS community, creating huge antagonism towards SEA and the ARC format itself (which was driven out of mainstream use in the MS-DOS world fairly quickly). None of this has much to do with shareware license violations (which typically involve using a program beyond its trial period without registering it), as far as I can see.. AnonMoos (talk) 03:26, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

"Re: shareware license violated"...
Clearly, you are familiar with the court case, the history, and some of the facts. I'm not going into a wiki-war. I simply want some acknowledgment where it's due. Regardless of shareware rights violated, or otherwise it WAS Thom's source code that lead to the development of the ZIP file, yes? I will coincide that perhaps the 'shareware rights violated' is an opinion (even though they won in court). Give the guy a break dude, I hate to see one of the founders of what we today call the internet be forgotten because of a difference of opinion that happened years ago. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.253.118.61 (talk) 05:04, 4 September 2010 (UTC)


 * He was not a "founder of the internet"; he pioneered unified archiving and compression, and so made BBS downloads a little quicker, and downloaded files also a little easier to unpack, at a time when the BBS world was almost completely separate from the Internet. He seems to have been more right than wrong on the majority of the issues in the lawsuit, but he made missteps by which he ended up depriving himself of many of the benefits he might have expected from his legal semi-victory. AnonMoos (talk) 06:35, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

Clarification
What does this mean: Even today, the origin of the ZIP file format being a derivative of the ARC file format (In shareware form) is still fiercely debated by both sides. Could someone expand on this? 2fort5r (talk) 23:06, 4 September 2010 (UTC)


 * It means absolutely nothing in that particular phrasing -- one of the people who edits this article from time to time is hung up on the idea that the SEA vs. PKWARE lawsuit was somehow over the issue of "shareware", which is really not the case (see above). Sorry I didn't catch this earlier... AnonMoos (talk) 03:56, 11 December 2010 (UTC)