why I like having a proprietary archive format

[shack@deimos.frii.com (Randy Shackelford)]

I've read Nathan's bellows about how Stuffit uses a proprietary format for
its files so many times now, I thought I'd tell anyone who cares why it's
a good idea to have such a format. It's good for a simple reason: password
protection. If you want a form of security for your archives, you don't
want any ol' schmuck to write a program to unarchive the files. If that were
possible, someone could implement an unarchiver which doesn't support
password protection, and your security goes right into the crapper.
But happily, Stuffit can archive in other formats, zip, unix compress, and
tar to name three. I had heard talk at one time that Aladdin was interested
in adding NuFX support as well. Naturally I use native Stuffit format for 
practically everything myself. Anyhow, here's another point of view on
why proprietary formats exist.
-- 
Randy Shackelford                                 
shack@frii.com