It depends on where you define traction to have occurred. In the classic "crossing the chasm" terminology. A "good enough" solution that is open can attract ea

It depends on where you define traction to have occurred. In the classic "crossing the chasm" terminology. A "good enough" solution that is open can attract early adopters and these same early adopters can become evangelists, developers who improve the open product, or developers who use the open product to create additional products (and sometimes show others how they did this in a devel/evangelism hybrid.) The improvements in awareness, product quality, and product ecosystem that come from all three of those variants of the early adopter are what gets the product into the mainstream and it is usually not until progress has been made on all three fronts that anyone claims that a product is "getting traction." The lack of an alternative choice will push a lot of people into the early adopter space for some product niches, which can lead to a fast elevator ride into mainstream usage for some products (c.f. MySQL, Linux, etc.) This is not the case with video codecs. The field is technically rigorous so only a few have the chops to contribute code, the alternatives (h.264) are currently better and widely available so few have much to gain by building the Theora ecosystem, which really only leaves the evangelists who are interested in the product as a mission rather than as a tool. This group is unlikely to gain significant traction with the mainstream computing audience.