BBS: The Documentary, Part 8: Compression
Part of Jason Scott’s BBS: The Documentary, this short film documents a feud between Tom Henderson and Phil Katz (who went on to create the zip format) over file compression software in the 1980s. Henderson distributed his compression program as shareware (users were expected to pay) with source, which Katz subsequently copied, then recoded some parts of the program for speed and sold it. Henderson went to court on copyright infringement and won. The interesting thing isn’t the legal or technical aspect, but the human side—the fact that it led to a David-versus-Goliath scenario in which Henderson was cast as the evil corporate David eager to kill competition, when in fact both sides were small family companies with at most a half-dozen employees. The hate mail must’ve been nasty when it could make a grown man cry over a decade later.
Of course, Katz isn’t here to tell his side, since he drank himself to death in 2000. Anyway, you can download the documentary (it’s only ~20 minutes long) from Tom Henderson’s site for free, entirely legally, if that concerns you.
