Reading this sounds like a hit piece. I don't doubt he drank himself to death. There is an embellishment of events and the author is writing from the perspective as though they/he/she were there.
I am writing this after coming back from the bar with friends. I would actually consider myself someone who drinks too much. I have written code for years, tried and failed on over four startups. I have spent a week in a hospital for suicide and depression. I currently work a cushy job where I make great money and write code that a first year CS student could write.
This man was depressed. He tried to find outlets, self medicate, whatever the garbage we need to say about his actions that we need to say. He needed help. Rather than criticize his failures, lets make a note of how fragile our human psyches are and work towards helping one another cope with our internal battles.
Nobody is criticizing him and the article most definitely doesn't read "like a hit piece". At least that's not what I got from it, I thought it was very compassionate actually.
Sorry about your problems... I can't say I know what you're talking about because I only had a glimpse of depression, but I understand the feeling of knowing your life isn't going to get better EVER and should preferably end right now.
Thankfully this turned out to be not true, I changed countries and now I'm happier than ever, but this wasn't some revelation that just dawned on me - it was just pure luck and I'm not sure if I could have escaped myself.
Have you already tried moving to a different country? I think there is something wrong with Western Europe, I've always been a happy person before I went there and my happiness returned when I got back home... It's possible that the problem is with the entire western society, so you should probably keep that in mind before you do something stupid. Although correlation doesn't imply causation, of course.
I agree whole heartedly and have been to some of the places you have. One thing I have noticed in some friends and acquaintances who've worked out of depression is that they can attain this loftiness to themselves. They feel superior to those who are where they once were. Once I saw that in real life, I began to extrapolate it to a lot of the comments on the internet that tear down the depressed. Somehow they lose their empathy along the way.
In contrast to the far overused sugary definition, Phil Katz really was a rock star programmer. He also died a rock star's tragic and pathetic death.
There is probably no line between self and business for a guy like PK. At that time you could build a significant program or even a game singlehandedly. Most likely he obsessively made his better ARC program for its own reward (you could use it for free) and he was surprised both by the commercial success and the subsequent legal attack. Very personal indeed, and if he wasn't already a completely tortured soul, that would be more than enough to take away any shred of sense he had made of the world. Give enough cash and free time to someone who has been cracked like that and he quite easily can end up dead from an existential crisis with no practical boundaries.
Considering this was some 25 years ago now, if he thought about intellectual property issues at all, the mindset at that time was very reasonable in that your source code and executable was considered copyrightable like a book - it didn't matter if it provided the same functionality as someone else's program as long as you wrote the code. Just consider the fate of the original spreadsheet for confirmation of this.
To summarize, before you take any stand against the tragedy that is the life of PK, consider that there is probably a huge concentration of people very much like the early Phil Katz right here on HN. The man simply needed help, and he didn't get it.
> So now Phil Katz is dead. He drank himself to death, alone in a motel room, a bottle of booze in his hand and five empties in the room. One can only guess what drove him to such a tragic end, but it is a fitting demise for a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie.
> I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement:
> "If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life."
What a stunningly vindictive and spiteful thing to say.
This is the very first time I've ever heard anyone say "he deserved to die because he stole my code."
(Don't worry, I'm not shooting the messenger! I appreciate your posting this - it's a fascinating look at human nature.)
"In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988.
Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it. "
"... settlement of the lawsuit ... under which ... PKWARE paid SEA to obtain a license that allowed the distribution of PKWARE's ARC-compatible programs until January 31, 1989, after which PKWARE would not license, publish or distribute any ARC compatible programs or utilities that process ARC compatible files.
...
After the lawsuit, PKWARE released one last version of his PKARC and PKXARC utilities under the new names "PKPAK" and "PKUNPAK", and from then on concentrated on developing the separate programs PKZIP and PKUNZIP, which were based on new and different file compression techniques."
Wiki also says
"The SEA vs. PKWARE dispute quickly expanded into one of the largest controversies the BBS world ever saw."
Wow, I had no idea the ARC source was open. IIRC, at the time PKARC and PKZIP were legendary, and the Sea guys got a bad rep from the whole situation. But reading that post and the ARC license now, it sure does look like Katz was a putz.
In the event that anyone happens to be interested in knowing more about the conflict between SEA and PKWARE, here's a pretty solid collection of notes and BBS postings.
"As soon as he started drinking, you could see a little smile on his face. That's when he could talk to people, or tell a joke."
Coders in general are susceptible to alcohol for these kinds of reasons. Add in flexi hours (hey it doesn't matter what time I show up as long as I ship code, right?), and it's practically the ideal job for a functioning alcoholic.
I've seen dozens of fellow programmers slip down the slope. It's particularly bad in the financial sector in London, where "trader culture" of hard drinking, drugs and women is seen as acceptable. Usually it's well concealed until early to mid-thirties. Often their situation rapidly degenerates after a relationship breakup or family bereavement. What's fun and social when you're with your friends in your 20s isn't so much when you're 35 and lonely.
Well, it's not just in our industry. Alcohol is basically not treated as a drug by society. But its abuse have consecuences as bad as any other "hard" drug.
"Clad in nothing but underwear, he was suffering from uncontrollable hiccups and burdened by a horribly swollen stomach." While some internal organs were destroyed and he was slowly dying. Terrible.
That said, if not alcohol he would have found something else. The problem was not the drug itself.
Some personality types gravitate towards drug abuse and some types gravitate towards programming as a primary activity. The overlap between the two sets is very significant.
Add in money and a tendency to have few friends, and almost certainly no SO, and the wonder is there aren't even more casualties. Though there are a huge number of people who get older and wonder where exactly it all went wrong.
The takeaway is that Katz optimized existing code, his mother ran the pkzip business, they defamed the arczip guys, and Katz himself died a paranoid, drunken wreck. The problem with the doc is that pretty much nobody is there to defend Katz. It's an old war, and really doesn't matter now.
I logged in to read about CodeCombat. Instead, I read this submission. Mostly because it was sitting there forlornly with no comments. Alcoholism is really painful. It in no way lessens the excellence of the contribution of talented people; it only makes us cherish them more. We just don't get to help often because the destruction happens in a way that is inaccessible to outsiders.
That's brutal, and hard to read, especially when I've experience shreds of that loneliness, that unreasonable fear that you have nowhere and no one to go to.
Each morning I read a note to myself: "The high score isn't money, it's people who love you".
Katz talked freer, laughed harder, stayed up longer and dreamed bigger when he had a drink in his hand, friends say. Drinking brought a painfully shy man out of his shell.
I wonder if alcohol served him as an unfortunate remedy for his introverted person.
And on unrelated note:
He got real good at optimizing programs, and he learned to get the job done with the least amount of instructions and running times.
I like the culture of code bumping back in the day. Although, we now live in a time of abundant CPU cycles and memory, there's still value in that, even above many layers of abstraction. Sadly, increasing number of programmers do not care or even aware of their programs' resource footprint on the hardware.
I'm a strong introvert and I find that a few drinks makes me feel like what I suspect an extrovert feels like. Personally, I'd much rather socialize with a few drinks in me; and if there's a large group involved, it's almost mandatory for me to enjoy myself at all!
Not sure about other industries, but console game development is still pretty much about that - but more nowadays about caches, and optimal (but not flexible) data structures/memory allocation/etc and largely lately gpu, batching, etc.
"I can think of no more fitting epitaph than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement:
'If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your
conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life.'"
Being young, I stumbled on PK Ware once while doing a task for a job. I started inquiring about their service, and was slightly rude to a rep. The conversation went something like...
Me: Why would I pay 40 dollars for zipping software I get for free? You guys are totally late to the game, winzip and winrar already exist.
Rep: ....... Yea, we started the industry, and our founder died from alcohol abuse...
Phil was my teenage icon. Maybe he wasn't such a great genius, but he did a lot of money out of almost nothing, and never bothered himself much about anything.
to me this is a glimpse of the computer world near 2000. the idea of file compression just becoming popularized.
these days, every time a startup reaches an IPO, we get a movie, book or long series of articles. we learn the guys revolutionizing social media are total basketcases
[+] [-] notdarkyet|12 years ago|reply
I am writing this after coming back from the bar with friends. I would actually consider myself someone who drinks too much. I have written code for years, tried and failed on over four startups. I have spent a week in a hospital for suicide and depression. I currently work a cushy job where I make great money and write code that a first year CS student could write.
This man was depressed. He tried to find outlets, self medicate, whatever the garbage we need to say about his actions that we need to say. He needed help. Rather than criticize his failures, lets make a note of how fragile our human psyches are and work towards helping one another cope with our internal battles.
[+] [-] psionski|12 years ago|reply
Sorry about your problems... I can't say I know what you're talking about because I only had a glimpse of depression, but I understand the feeling of knowing your life isn't going to get better EVER and should preferably end right now.
Thankfully this turned out to be not true, I changed countries and now I'm happier than ever, but this wasn't some revelation that just dawned on me - it was just pure luck and I'm not sure if I could have escaped myself.
Have you already tried moving to a different country? I think there is something wrong with Western Europe, I've always been a happy person before I went there and my happiness returned when I got back home... It's possible that the problem is with the entire western society, so you should probably keep that in mind before you do something stupid. Although correlation doesn't imply causation, of course.
[+] [-] mylons|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OldSchool|12 years ago|reply
There is probably no line between self and business for a guy like PK. At that time you could build a significant program or even a game singlehandedly. Most likely he obsessively made his better ARC program for its own reward (you could use it for free) and he was surprised both by the commercial success and the subsequent legal attack. Very personal indeed, and if he wasn't already a completely tortured soul, that would be more than enough to take away any shred of sense he had made of the world. Give enough cash and free time to someone who has been cracked like that and he quite easily can end up dead from an existential crisis with no practical boundaries.
Considering this was some 25 years ago now, if he thought about intellectual property issues at all, the mindset at that time was very reasonable in that your source code and executable was considered copyrightable like a book - it didn't matter if it provided the same functionality as someone else's program as long as you wrote the code. Just consider the fate of the original spreadsheet for confirmation of this.
To summarize, before you take any stand against the tragedy that is the life of PK, consider that there is probably a huge concentration of people very much like the early Phil Katz right here on HN. The man simply needed help, and he didn't get it.
[+] [-] fogleman|12 years ago|reply
http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html
[+] [-] Stratoscope|12 years ago|reply
> I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement:
> "If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life."
What a stunningly vindictive and spiteful thing to say.
This is the very first time I've ever heard anyone say "he deserved to die because he stole my code."
(Don't worry, I'm not shooting the messenger! I appreciate your posting this - it's a fascinating look at human nature.)
[+] [-] chebucto|12 years ago|reply
"In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988.
Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it. "
is contradicted by this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz
"... settlement of the lawsuit ... under which ... PKWARE paid SEA to obtain a license that allowed the distribution of PKWARE's ARC-compatible programs until January 31, 1989, after which PKWARE would not license, publish or distribute any ARC compatible programs or utilities that process ARC compatible files.
...
After the lawsuit, PKWARE released one last version of his PKARC and PKXARC utilities under the new names "PKPAK" and "PKUNPAK", and from then on concentrated on developing the separate programs PKZIP and PKUNZIP, which were based on new and different file compression techniques."
Wiki also says
"The SEA vs. PKWARE dispute quickly expanded into one of the largest controversies the BBS world ever saw."
Any greybeards care to comment?
[+] [-] Amadou|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mansam|12 years ago|reply
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONTROVERSY/LAWSUITS/S...
[+] [-] rangibaby|12 years ago|reply
What is old is new again
[+] [-] tdubhro1|12 years ago|reply
Coders in general are susceptible to alcohol for these kinds of reasons. Add in flexi hours (hey it doesn't matter what time I show up as long as I ship code, right?), and it's practically the ideal job for a functioning alcoholic.
I've seen dozens of fellow programmers slip down the slope. It's particularly bad in the financial sector in London, where "trader culture" of hard drinking, drugs and women is seen as acceptable. Usually it's well concealed until early to mid-thirties. Often their situation rapidly degenerates after a relationship breakup or family bereavement. What's fun and social when you're with your friends in your 20s isn't so much when you're 35 and lonely.
It's striking how casual and uninformed the general attitude to this drug is in our industry, e.g. http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works-creativity/
[+] [-] amercade|12 years ago|reply
"Clad in nothing but underwear, he was suffering from uncontrollable hiccups and burdened by a horribly swollen stomach." While some internal organs were destroyed and he was slowly dying. Terrible.
That said, if not alcohol he would have found something else. The problem was not the drug itself.
[+] [-] epo|12 years ago|reply
Add in money and a tendency to have few friends, and almost certainly no SO, and the wonder is there aren't even more casualties. Though there are a huge number of people who get older and wonder where exactly it all went wrong.
[+] [-] mtdewcmu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mynameishere|12 years ago|reply
http://www.esva.net/~thom/arczip.wmv
The takeaway is that Katz optimized existing code, his mother ran the pkzip business, they defamed the arczip guys, and Katz himself died a paranoid, drunken wreck. The problem with the doc is that pretty much nobody is there to defend Katz. It's an old war, and really doesn't matter now.
[+] [-] tptacek|12 years ago|reply
http://www.esva.net/~thom/baker.html
The team that owned ARC was even smaller than Katz's, and PKARC was based directly on ARC.
[+] [-] billmalarky|12 years ago|reply
I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement:
"If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life."
(Apparently PKARC was blatantly ripped off of ARC and Phil refused to license ARC.)
[+] [-] GuerraEarth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] benmathes|12 years ago|reply
Each morning I read a note to myself: "The high score isn't money, it's people who love you".
[+] [-] znowi|12 years ago|reply
I wonder if alcohol served him as an unfortunate remedy for his introverted person.
And on unrelated note:
He got real good at optimizing programs, and he learned to get the job done with the least amount of instructions and running times.
I like the culture of code bumping back in the day. Although, we now live in a time of abundant CPU cycles and memory, there's still value in that, even above many layers of abstraction. Sadly, increasing number of programmers do not care or even aware of their programs' resource footprint on the hardware.
[+] [-] xb95|12 years ago|reply
I'm a strong introvert and I find that a few drinks makes me feel like what I suspect an extrovert feels like. Personally, I'd much rather socialize with a few drinks in me; and if there's a large group involved, it's almost mandatory for me to enjoy myself at all!
[+] [-] malkia|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] npx|12 years ago|reply
http://www.desototimes.com/articles/2012/12/18/news/doc50cfc...
The brightest of us are the hardest to reach and the most difficult to persuade, but they're also the most painful to lose.
To anyone reading this: if someone that you care about needs help, don't wait until tomorrow. Don't make excuses. Don't fuck around.
[+] [-] adamsrog|12 years ago|reply
Deep.
[+] [-] sac2171|12 years ago|reply
Me: Why would I pay 40 dollars for zipping software I get for free? You guys are totally late to the game, winzip and winrar already exist.
Rep: ....... Yea, we started the industry, and our founder died from alcohol abuse...
Me: Good joke...
.......
It's a sad tale indeed.
[+] [-] ck2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anovikov|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrcactu5|12 years ago|reply
these days, every time a startup reaches an IPO, we get a movie, book or long series of articles. we learn the guys revolutionizing social media are total basketcases
[+] [-] notdarkyet|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mattmcegg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] racl101|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]