If this model turned out to be profitable, it would be a good precedent for subsequent codecs seeking universal adoption while still paying for investment.
With few users and a paid barrier to entry, few hardware vendors took the leap. No hardware support means fewer people bothered to encode to Vorbis... and the spiral to the bottom continued.
If you're trying to use the network effect to your advantage, you do exactly what the MPEG-LA has done: the first couple of years are free, then everyone pays. The only want to combat that is to do the same.
Still, I'll amend my above plan to include some period of royalty-free hardware. The real trouble is device manufacturers not wanting both On2 and H.264 hardware (it's unfortunate that MPEG-LA won't just step up to the plate with perpetual royalty-free software and make the whole issue moot)
[1] http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/vorbis-dev/2002-September/00...
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novas0x2a: i feel vaguely insane. did xiph ever (2002 timeframe, perhaps?) charge for a vorbis encoder or decoder? I had a pretty distinct memory of that, but going back and researching it, I can't find any sign of it. Did anyone ever charge for an encoder or decoder impl?
xiphmont: I've taken on works for hire in the past. That was not as part of Xiph. There was also a work for hire the company renegged on, and we opened that as the original Tremor. But I also wrote a decoder with Neuros and wrote an encoder for Mercora.
novas0x2a: I think I remember reading about tremor before it was open, and that's where my misconception comes from. thanks :)