Arc Wars

[ primarily MSDOS ]

n. holy wars over which archiving program one should use.

The first Arc War was sparked when System Enhancement Associates (SEA) sued PKWare for copyright and trademark infringement on its ARC program.

PKWare's PKARC outperformed ARC on both compression and speed while largely retaining compatibility (it introduced a new compression type that could be disabled for backward-compatibility).

PKWare settled out of court to avoid enormous legal costs (both SEA and PKWare are small companies); as part of the settlement, the name of PKARC was changed to PKPAK.

The public backlash against SEA for bringing suit helped to hasten the demise of ARC as a standard when PKWare and others introduced new, incompatible archivers with better compression algorithms.