>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 am old enough to have actually been involved with FidoNet when all of this was going down, and at the time Katz pretty much had the community believing that he was a little guy being unfairly squashed by the huge corporate behemoth of System Enhancement Associates for making a better version of their software. Pretty much every single bit of that turned out, indeed, to be a lie. Katz did steal SEA's work and claimed otherwise, and SEA was smaller than PKWare.
I get where you're coming from, but Katz basically stole Henderson's work, lied about it, and destroyed Henderson's business and, for many years, his reputation. I don't think I can really blame him for not having been terribly diplomatic about the man's death.
The whole thing hurts because things got twisted for no reasons. Both tiny business. Birth of networks. Katz did not only rename and sell, based on the reddit comment it had value. It's just that social perception and hubris turned into a sour sauce. If Katz and Henderson's companies managed to collaborate instead of going into battle .. I can easily see immensely better ending for both parties.
When Katz died people asked the ARC people what they thought about him: http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html