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I can't find the post now, but one of the RAD developers behind this codec (it's their 3rd ANS based codec I believe) has said that they would likely be willing to open source their ANS family for a one-time payment of iirc around $5 million. No need for the entire RAD stack.

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Oops, his ballpark was $50 million. I obviously have no idea how much things cost.

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.

Google VP10 and WebP are also planned to be ANS-based: https://chromium.googlesource.com/webm/libvpx/+/fb9186d68d49... https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/#/c/338781/

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