| This guy has always rubbed me the wrong way. Like he's grifting. Which isn't helped by the fact I've learned recently that apparently he literally did run a scam company and spread malware and got shut down by a state government, as other commenters have noted here. According to Raymond Chen here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=98...
"Furthermore, since the compression and decompression code weren’t written by anybody from Microsoft, there is no expertise in the code base, which means that debugging and making changes is a very difficult undertaking." Which kind of conflicts with Dave's story, where he was, in fact, working at Microsoft. Additionally, Raymond Chen says: "On of the terms of the license is that the compression and decompression code for Zip folders should be tied to UI actions and not be programmatically drivable. The main product for the company that provided the compression and decompression code is the compression and decompression code itself. If Windows allowed programs to compress and decompression files by driving the shell namespace directly, then that company would have given away their entire business!" It doesn't really make sense that he would have had this sort of restriction on the licensing since there was no "company" involved and he had no main product to protect there. According to the leaked source code for XP/2K3, The zipped-folders support in Windows was from Info-zip. Dave did copy something from "VZip" on his own: History: Sep-26-96 Davepl Created (from old VZip code)
This was a set of utility CIDL functions and not related to the zip functionality in Windows. |