Xref: utzoo comp.sys.ibm.pc:20001 misc.legal:5975 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!imagen!atari!portal!cup.portal.com!truett From: truett@cup.portal.com Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,misc.legal Subject: Re: PK vs ARC - Thom Henderson Speaks Message-ID: <9756@cup.portal.com> Date: 5 Oct 88 06:38:26 GMT References: <8851@cup.porta Organization: The Portal System (TM) Lines: 37 XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.2190 The statement by Mr. Henderson is interesting for several reasons: (1) It carefully avoids speaking to the issue of whether the use of "ARC" as a file extension is considered to be a violation of trademark rights. In light of the limited name space allowed by the DOS standard, such a claim is, at best, galling and, at worst, either unconscionable or maybe even unethical if one purports to be encouraging a standard. (2) It is interesting that Thom promises that licensed shareware authors will receive notice of "any changes in ARC". One presumes this is a perpetual promise. (Maybe the entire world should send in a piece of source to be licensed so that he can't afford to update "ARC" because the mailing cost would ruin him and SEA!) (3) Henderson seems to be trying to sound real nice and friendly. Yet his hire expert (John Navas) continues to publicly refer to the programs that were distributed by Phil Katz as "trojans", a term that is generally considered quite perjorative. I would hope the Mr. Henderson does not share an enthusiasm for such vicious terminology. It would be nice to see Mr. Henderson publicly condemn such vitriolic statements by those in his employ. It seems to be agreed here in Silicon Valley that Mr. Katz probably could be considered to have "stolen" some of SEA's code, though there are some questions even about this. Some correspondents on this network state that Katz' source was in assembler. Yet Mr. Navas states that his source was so similar to SEA's C source that you could see where the comments had been erased to remove reference to SEA. Question: Is it possible to erase the comments from C source and magically get assembler source as the result? Finally, I will just note that the name SEA is itself confusing, since full page ads regularly appear in several publications for Software Engineers of America (Lace Success, NY) who also use SEA as a corporate trademark. It has confused me numerous times. Truett Lee Smith, Ph.D., Sunnyvale, CA UUCP: truett@cup.portal.com