Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!unix.cis.pitt.edu!dsinc!netnews.upenn.edu!vax1.cc.lehigh.edu!vlsi3b15!batman!nicholaA From: nicholaA@batman.moravian.EDU (Andy Nicholas) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple Subject: Re: NuPak 2.0 Summary: Oh no, not again... Message-ID: <1206@batman.moravian.EDU> Date: 13 Mar 90 05:32:18 GMT References: <25fb4fd0.5f7@petunia.CalPoly.EDU> <104*delaneyg@wnre.aecl.ca> Organization: Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA Lines: 72 In article <104*delaneyg@wnre.aecl.ca>, delaneyg@wnre.aecl.ca (Grant Delaney) writes: > This is like taking the work of other's and trying to make a buck on it. All > the work on shrinkit (which this is obviously based on) has been done by > Andy. Let use not forget the problems that ANDY went through to > start to go for a comercial product with L & L. The only thing you appear > to be getting it stuffit. My suggestion is send the money to Andy he did > most of the work anyway. Remember the Great Flap before!!! I wasn't going to say this before, but could we just let this thing go? This basically just drags up a lot of fairly painful memories that I could just as soon do without. We've resolved this once before... I don't know what the legal status of Andy and Kent's code is (free, public domain, copyrighted, what?), but I don't think they would object to having Joshua put it into NuPak. Besides, supposedly Joshua is starting to rewrite a large part of it in assembler anyway. The thing which confuses the life out of me, though, is that gs/shrinkit will do everything NuPak will do (and much more) and do it faster and in most cases much more cleanly, and it'll do it for free. Why are these guys BOTHERING to write NuPak? I mean, sheesh, Josh is dependant on Kent and Andy to make sure that he can pack files... I'd much rather see someone as bright and energetic as Joshua doing something that he can make a great contribution with.. well, sure, unstuffing is important, and it's not like I feel I have "competition" (how can I? shrinkit is free...), it's just that I think Joshua could do SO MUCH BETTER if he would work on something which needs working on, ya know? You know, like Excel/GS, Wingz/GS, or something like that... oh well, at least these Frontier Tech guys keep me on my toes. I kept having to check the files that it produced to make sure that they were standard NuFX files and nothign strange was going on. Joshua Thompson, the author of NuPak basically took Andy McFadden and Kent Dickey's C code and made a program with a nice user-interface. Then he took the ARC (or compress, both will work) C source and added that to get it to unstuff stuffit files. It's really not that hard if you have a working C compiler... it's harder to do in assembler.. which is what I did in gs/shrinkit. That was one of the 'big secrets'... gs/shrinkit unstuffs stuffit files. There are a few 'other secrets' as well, but could we just stop this 'trying to make a buck off of so-and-so's code talk? See, even Raymond Lau, the author of Stuffit "cheated" - the source code which he used for Stuffing files came either from unix compress or from ARC. So much so, that the little idosyncracies that make unix COMPRESS what it is STILL exist in StuffIt 1.5.1 to this very day. The unix compress sources were public domain, Ray used them (or ARC, I don't know which). Ray made a great product. Ray is now selling stuff based on that product. What I'd kinda like to know, however, is how Ray can get away with selling Stuffit Deluxe which unZIPs ZIP files when the only unzipping code which is available for public use is the stuff by samuel smith (might have gotten that name wrong) which strictly prohibits commercial redistribution of his C code. Who knows, Ray might have gotten permission or wrote it himself...??? (I don't want to impugn Ray Lau, I respect the guy a whole lot). I feel that archive utilities that are going to be used by everyone and his brother should be free. They contribute to the II user's sense of community. Anything that not everyone NEEDS (like, say, a backup program based on shrinkit or a terminal program which has an 'auto-extract' feature), I think is pretty fair game for commercial or shareware stuff... although I despise shareware. Right now, I need to write the segmented memory management routines so that gs/shrinkit won't go doing mindnumbingly stupid things like trying to allocate _MaxBlock to do stuff. You can use a fragmented memory situation better with my stuff... actually, some to think of it, this is one of the last major things I need to do before gs/shrinkit is almost done. Gee, think about that... finished... I thought I'd never hear that word... > Grant Delaney andy -- Yeah!