Perhaps it's time to attempt to "free" such software via a cooperative effort, e.g. by talking to RAD about a one-time payment for an open source release and organizing that as a Kickstarter project.
That isn't a sustainable way to keep a company running. The amount of work that RAD puts into stuff like this, BINK, and their other tools if you wanted to do a OTP you'd be looking at something in the neighborhood of 50-60M.
Everyone uses their stuff in games since it's that good. You'd have to replace licensing costs not only for each game but each platform those games ship on.
Still, I think many of the key ideas behind Kraken are out there and not patented. Zstd and lzfse already use ANS variants, for instance. But they're targeting different speed/compression tradeoffs, and aren't implemented as well as Kraken.
Perhaps it's time to attempt to "pay" for such software via cooperative effort, eg. by the publisher setting a price for it, and then people paying $5.
Why people will pay $5 for coffee they could make at home for 'free' but not for software is beyond me.
i know for me personally, one reason i've been reluctant to pay for software is just that they paying-for-software experience has been so terrible -- you have to clumsily reenter your payment information, you get emailed, sometimes slowly, a registration code, which you inevitably lose and breaks your software when you have to reinstall on a new computer, etc.
Whenever I think rationally I almost always opt to buy software vs make it myself.
* Google builds a browser to control the market and make sure ads and their own websites are working well
* Apple builds a browser to make sure web browsing on their devices is working well, uses little power and is not adversely affected by the competition
* Mozilla is swimming in money obviously after all the previous Google payments
So, money is not the issue with browsers - except that we could probably have a browser with built-in privacy (no tracking) and reliable ad blocking if users paid for it instead of large commercial entities. But that's very hypothetical (Google would buy that probably).