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The reason why no one noticed is that everyone has been trivially circumnavigating the patents for decades (the usual model being a converter that doesn't come with its own lame.dll but asks you to put one into its folder) and Frauenhofer hasn't been caring much when it was private users as opposed to hardware manufacturers. If not for this, something like Ogg Vorbis would have taken its place.

As to files, I'm sure they start mattering to you when your train goes through a tunnel or your wifi is down. The fileless world is the leakiest abstraction of them all.

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I sometimes wonder if the name "ogg vorbis" hampered its uptake. MP3 is admittedly a pretty jargony name too but isn't otherwise "weird", compared to Ogg Vorbis is just Klingon-esque.

As a long time creative worker in addition to my technical work, I’ve tried in vain to explain to the FOSS crowd that names, UIs, user flows, etc a) really matter if they want anyone outside of the technical world to use their tools, and b) what other software developers think of them isn’t a good measure of those things. What Mastodon would need to have done to be a Twitter replacement for general audiences was my most recent losing battle. Lots of haughty, dismissive “federation is not that complicated” and “I think toots is a cute analog to tweet and the people who don’t like it just need to get over it.” Well, the nearly immediate mass exodus after the incredibly energetic mass adoption says everything we need to know about that.

“Well I don’t think it’s too complicated,” doesn’t really say much from someone whose profession is wrangling that complexity. “Well I don’t think it’s unappealing,” doesn’t say much from someone that has no experience wrangling the different nuanced ways different things can be appealing to different people in different contexts and how that affects the way people approach and interact with stuff.

Interface design, copywriting, branding— these are all communication mediums that deal with the emotional intangibles, instincts, and irrational tendencies we all have even when we don’t see them. It’s not about taste and aesthetic preference, they’re tools to solve communication problems. Developers on a whole have a hard enough time dealing with communication in technical documentation for software they wrote, let alone effective visual communication. I’m seeing some progress in developers realizing how much more impact software can have as a problem solving tool when designers are involved… but a whole lot still think designers just add frivolous fluff and that their quirky interfaces more informed by the API implementation than how users solve problems isn’t the problem — users failing to read their wall-o-text documentation is.

I still try, occasionally. I agree that it's very hard to convince the OSS community to think about the user first and foremost. Especially with the fact that choice is not a good thing for the vast majority of the world, and is not valued as much as they think. But suggest that forking or rewriting (in rust!) a project for the Nth time is stupid, and everyone should be focused on making one really good implementation that doesn't have to keep reinventing wheels, and you will be burned at the stake.

I agree it's always amazing that FOSS can be so smart, but so dumb as to not understand basic marketing.

I wouldn’t even expect them to understand basic marketing themselves: there’s a lot more to it than many assume. I would hope they could understand the value of someone that does. There’s this kind of “well if I don’t understand it then it’s probably not worth understanding” cockiness in software that I was definitely guilty of in my twenties at the very least. Someone thinking they can dismiss expert knowledge or even entire fields out-of-hand based on a few a priori thought experiments says a lot more about that person than the fields they denigrate.

The name didn't help, but the biggest issue was when I first encountered the format it was very difficult for me to find software that could play it. It's been a while, but IIRC Windows Media player and Realplayer didn't like it, I can't remember if WinAmp the time supported it either, I think it may have gotten it eventually?

Adoption on Windows was definitely an issue for that time frame. Even as someone that was willing to adopt strange software, or compile it on Windows, it just wasn't worth it for the cross-platform use (mostly for mobile devices at the time, including generic players, and iPods).

I started using RockBox around 2005/2006, but it still wasn't worth converting my entire music collection to Ogg Vorbis from MP3. Right around that time, my vehicle stereo could suddenly support MP3/WMA files, and I could burn multiple albums to a CD for my truck stereo. MP3 had the broadest support across devices, and basically become an industry standard, even with the licensing.

Another thing to consider, and especially on a mobile device with a limited battery is hardware decoding.

MP3 was popular enough that most mobile devices were able to decode them via hardware, while OGG and FLAC where playable though software decoding but at the cost of using more battery.

Winamp supported it by around 2004.

Installing a codec pack was one of my first tasks when setting up a new Windows installation in that era. K-Lite was a popular choice.

Then WMP would play ogg, though you'd probably have switched to MPC and Winamp.

>Klingon-esque

The "Og" in Ogg was a reference to "Orion ship G" in the game Netrek (https://www.netrek.org/) so definitely not Klingon :)

(Nettrek was a star trek themed online space combat game featuring Federation, Klingon, Romulan and Orion as the playable factions)

IIRC "ogging" in NetTrek was carrier killing suicide run.

Uh? Isn't that a reference to Nanny Ogg of Terry Pratchett's Discworld fame? Just like Vorbis is a head inquisitor (Exquisitor actually, of the Quisition IIRC) in Terry Pratchett's Small Gods (Also part of Discworld) ?

Colloquially they were always just referred to as Oggs, which wasn't too weird to my ears.

To my recollection what hampered uptake was simply that most software and especially most hardware did not support Oggs. So no-one encoding for distribution (i.e., P2P filesharing) used it. And once commercial streaming services came into being, they all used proprietary DRM-backed formats (WMA, and whatever iTunes used at the time, AAC?).

By the time digital music services gave up on DRM, MP3 patents were coming up on expiry, and MP3 encoder technology had advanced closing most of the gap between it and Ogg, especially when run at higher bitrates which cheaper storage and bandwidth made acceptable to use.

But now with many streaming services using Opus, all is right in the world again.

Never heard "Oggs" so ymmv.

Fully agreed on the hw support though. I had an mp3 player discman knock off, later cheap mp3 players and none of them played Ogg Vorbis, I want to say one of my Nokia dumbphones in the mid 00s could do mp3 but not Ogg Vorbis as well.

A lot of the widely popular s1mp3s could play Ogg, FLAC, APE, WMA, and a few other obscure formats (as well as plain uncompressed WAV) but I think the real reason was a lack of availability - except for the anti-patent/FOSS purists, and some MS fans using WMA, everyone else was using MP3.

mp3 doesn't exactly fly off the tongue either. But maybe you've found the reason why bz2 never took off..

Are patents in general even useful in tech anymore? I remember older mentors almost keeping score with how many patents they authored, now I almost never hear the word patent mentioned unless it's a patent troll going after up and coming startups with vague yet somehow legally enforceable bs that costs millions to defend

When it comes to negotiating a new job, they are absolutely not something you want to underplay. Bring it up and talk about it, and the challenges you faced creating it. I feel like being able to talk about why you created something, and the challenges you faced, along with what you learned is a huge plus. Maybe I'm more old-school with this thinking, but when it comes to someone that is more senior and can provide useful knowledge to your team, I'd want this person over someone that was talking about the latest tech, but didn't have real experience to discuss in depth. To any recruiters, am I out of touch with this thinking?

I am at the beginning stages of looking elsewhere, because of some very poor choices made that disregarded my advice. I have extreme impostor syndrome because I have only helped juniors, but have never worked in a professional capacity with anyone that had more knowledge than myself. That isn't a flex, I wish I had mentors in a professional environment, but I never did. I have learned a ton on my own, and have worked with others that moved on to better careers. I was around at the beginning stages of the company, and have gained a lot of freedom like taking time off to watch my son when he's sick, or if I need to see a doctor. I have built on top of CMS software (Umbraco/.NET) and have figured out how to keep resources below what is recommended, and love what I do, but am being given the "opportunity" and direction from the President to leave the company because my salary can't be covered any longer. Not meant to tell a sob story, just genuinely looking for advice on finding something that will strike my interest and I can contribute to. I have been with this company for almost 18 years, and built it from nothing with a weird technology, into something that a lot of medical, insurance, banking, and law firms depend on.

Any advice is truly appreciated, as I was taken by surprise, but also know that I can achieve far more than what I currently practice. I spend late nights learning for fun, even at 45 years old.

I missed this earlier, not sure if you’ll even see it, but just know that your story hit home for me. I got a job out of college at #BigTech and gained a lot of momentum quickly, they were gonna promote me and threw money at me, but I realized what I was starting to specialize in was utterly useless outside this particular company. With the advice of a mentor I left money on the table and jumped ship to work at a start up, in part because I wanted to learn skills I could use at any company. I’m lucky I got this advice, but no question you’ll find another opportunity if need be

Design patents are absolutely useful.[1]

For large companies (Google, Apple, ...), other patents are useful defensively and as part of a war chest/patent portfolio.

For startups and inventors, they're probably OK but unlikely to prevent someone with deep pockets from eating your lunch and/or suing you to oblivion. The important defensive strategy is to be aware of related patents, though some are absurdly broad.

Execution usually matters more than ideas.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

IBM does a lot of things, but "holding patents" is one of the big ones.

Just because IBM does something doesn't mean it's useful to anyone outside IBM.

They are something to mention on your resume, or to impress investors that don't subscribe to "move fast and break things"

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