Shouldn't those patents be expiring soon?
Edit: Did some more research and the patent risk appears to have passed as of 2016. Still nobody seems to have interest in JPEG2000.
Edit: Did some more research and the patent risk appears to have passed as of 2016. Still nobody seems to have interest in JPEG2000.
There is simply no reason why people in 2016 or now would be interested in a format from 2000 that was a patent minefield until at least 2016.
Are people just more cavalier about the patent risk these days? The problem with JPEG2000 wasn't the patents we knew about, it was the possibility of submarine patents. People were still wary after the GIF debacle. Nobody wanted to be charged $0.05/image after the fact when they've delivered literally billions of images. Plus the courts were seen as very favorable towards patent holders, even when they were acting in bad faith.
These design decisions all made sense when clock rates were exponentiating, but they're all nightmares now that we rely on branch prediction and memory prefetching and superscalar execution units. The codec is simply not a good fit for the computing architectures we have today.
Arguably not a good choice for the year 2000, either, considering that all high performance CPUs at that time were out-of-order, superscalar and deeply pipelined.