Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!julian!uwovax!16012_3045
From: 16012_3045@uwovax.uwo.ca (Paul Gomme)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: ZOO
Message-ID: <2308@uwovax.uwo.ca>
Date: 13 Jun 89 15:19:32 GMT
References: <999@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> <120800003@silver> <7525@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> <2304@uwovax.uwo.ca> <2571@cveg.uucp>
Lines: 38
Organisation: Department of Economics, UWO, London, Ontario, Canada

In article <2571@cveg.uucp>, jms@hcx.uucp (Michael Stanley) writes:
> 
> In article <2304@uwovax.uwo.ca>, 16012_3045@uwovax.uwo.ca (Paul Gomme) writes:
>> 
>> At the risk of initiating a dispute which I suspect neither of us is able to
>> settle, I suspect that the courts have not, in fact, said that SEA owns the ARC
>> format.  There was no judgement, and so the courts cannot have made a decision.
> 
> Ah come on.  Lets not nitpick!  It doesn't matter EXACTLY what the courts
> decide, the MEANING behind the man's original statement was that WE can't
> write programs which can access ARC format archives without SEA's permission.

I'm not picking nits.  Let's suppose that someone with a big pocketbook decides
to write programs which access the ARC format without SEA's permission.  I'm
certain that such an individual or organization could eventually cause SEA to
give up their legal action.

> On the other hand, this is not true for zoo.  With zoo we (or someone else)
> are free to write a zoo archive program on ANY system any time we feel like
> it.  This means that there is a greater liklihood of finding zoo available
> on a greater variety of operating systems in the future (assuming zoo catches
> on).

And this comes back to my original posting on ZOO.  An acceptable ZOO
_does_not_ exits for VAX/VMS.  Rahul _claims_ that the fault is with Kermit. 
This is completely false.  I took a uuencoded file, unencoded it, and ran my
VMS ZOO on the file.  It puked.  I ran BILF on the file, and it ran fine. 
Having to run BILF on ZOO files is not an acceptable option.  Rewriting VMS ZOO
so that it works correctly is the appropriate action.  Unfortunately, I'm not
up to the task (I gave up using the VMS C compiler some time ago on exactly the
issue of file access).

Finally, I seriously question whether ZOO would be used for
comp.binaries.ibm.pc  were it not for the fact that the moderator wrote ZOO. 
This is not a flame, but merely my opinion.  I would be quite happy to use ZOO
if it worked on VMS.
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Paul Gomme        Bitnet:  gomme@uwovax.bitnet      ARPA:    gomme@uwo.ca