[ale] News bulletin: The temperature seems to be cooling down in Hell!!!

[James Baldwin]

On Jun 2, 2005, at 4:07 PM, James P. Kinney III wrote:

> But the "zip" format is proprietary, closed and requires a license  
> that
> is included with Microsoft Office and only available with M$ Office
> purchase.

Are you stating that the "zip" format described in this is not .ZIP  
file format maintained by PKWARE, Inc.?

PKWARE publishes the standard here: http://www.pkware.com/company/ 
standards/
There is a royalty free license for use of the compression algorithm.
Licensing information is within the application note for the standard.

There is a BSD derived licensed version at http://www.info-zip.org
Licensing information is http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/ 
license.html

The format is proprietary but open and has been in use on UNIX  
systems since before gzip.

For any format of that nature to work appropriately, its going to be  
required to be proprietary.

I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft released a different compression  
algorithm, however, I would be surprised if they called it "zip".