🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Jan9.193732.13640@svc.portal.com> daven@svc.portal.com writes:
>In article <1991Jan8.220654.858@spool.cs.wisc.edu> elliott@veronica.cs.wisc.edu (James Elliott) writes:
>>My main problem with compactor, at least as I understand the
>>situation, is that the archive format is "proprietary". Too many
[...]
>Actually, StuffIt Deluxe falls between an open format and a closed one.
>The Aladdin people will disclose the format to anyone they feel has
>good reason to know. With the MAUG group on CompuServe they have placed
>this information in escrow. The Aladdin people have also disclosed their
>viewer, translator, and optimizer technology to various entities as well.
>
>Compactor's author has steadfastly refused to devulge a iota of informa-
>tion.

Wrong! Compactor's author agreed to putting his source code in escrow.

What he and Compuserve could not agree to were the conditions under which
the source code would be released from escrow.

I might not have responded were it not for the use of modifiers like
"steadfastly refused" and "an iota" when refering to Compactor's
author, and statements like "will disclose the format to anyone they feel..."
when refering to Stuffit Deluxe's publishers.

Reality is we know *nothing* of the conditions of escrow involved
with Compuserve. We know nothing of the motives of the individuals.

One scenario could easily be along the line of:

"Party #1, believing their technology has a market life of 2 years
finds no objection to an escrow trigger X"

"Party #2, believing his technology has a market life of 5 years
finds escrow trigger X objectionable."

Compuserve apparently felt he had demonstrated good faith in whatever
their private negotiations were, as they allow his format.

Reality is, as far as Usenet must be concerned, there is no significant
difference between these two proprietary formats. If the escrow with
Compuserve is triggered, Usenet may not learn anything of the format,
someone at Compuserve might incorporate the format in a program which
might be available on Compuserve or commercially. It may remain
proprietary, not public domain. All that may change is the proprietor.

The question on Usenet should not be "which proprietary format do we
use?", it should remain "do we insist on public domain formats".

Personally, since all the parties involved provide freeware dearchivers,
I don't care.

I have a nice fast Mac to de-archive with, and I pay my own $ for the
link to my Unix machine, so I prefer to send the compressed data
across that link.

I understand to a point with those who would rather de-archive on their
29 Mip Sparcstation and download it to a Mac over a company or University
provided network. But not to the point where I must accept a 30% increase
in my download $ to save them some time.

And to those who earlier in this thread asked why we didn't just
implement the Usenet public domain Compress, Stuffit 1.5.1 is exactly
that, plus. During stuff it selectively tries Run Length Encoding,
Huffman Encoding, and LZW Encoding, using three known algorythms.
The LZW in question is the Usenet Compress. That's how unsit works,
when the header says its RLE or Huffman, it decodes it, when the header
says it's LZW, it pipes it through compress. "Read the Source, Luke."
Or just read the README. The following paragraph is from the README
included with the unsit source:

"This program opens a pipe to the "compress" program for doing the
uncompression of some of the files in the archive.  Most Unix sites
probably already have "compress".  If not, it can be found in the
comp.sources.unix archives."

In other words, Compress is not as good as Stuffit Deluxe or Compactor.

In still other words, using existing public domain formats instead of
these proprietary formats will cost 20-30% size.

Back to my original reasoning: I will reluctantly accept proprietary vs.
public domain arguments. Reluctant because the arguments are usually
someone's convenience vs. my dollars. I do not find arguments between
proprietary formats which are not based upon size or speed or level
of customer support acceptable. I do not believe "they let <someone>
escrow their source code or format" to be a valid argument. Honestly,
even if they let *me* escrow their source code or format it wouldn't
be a valid argument. I might find it convenient, it's true.

The previous paragraph presupposes that the format in question has
a freeware de-archive. If you quote my arguments, please be sure to include
this statement. All the formats in question I am aware of, except maybe
Diamond, which actually I am not very aware of, have such a freeware
de-archiver. Perhaps I should be specific? Stuffit Deluxe has a partial
de-archiver. Some optimized files require the shareware Stuffit Classic.
Compactor has the freeware Extractor. Disk Doubler has a freeware
expander.

'Nuff said.

jim


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