> GIF was, despite patents a dominating image format for a long time and PNG took quite a while to replace it. Yes, and it caused quite some legal grief for ma

> GIF was, despite patents a dominating image format for a long time and PNG took quite a while to replace it. Yes, and it caused quite some legal grief for many software vendors. > If we look at video codecs "open" variants are quite a small part. Heavily patented MPEG dominates the space over webm etc. We were talking about Open Source Software, not patents. There are lots of OSS codecs for the various MPEG formats. > Windows still got a very successful proprietary API. (Or set of APIs) Depends on what you call "successful". Sure, it's been in use, thanks to a quasi-monopoly. But I'm not aware of any other OS implementing the Windows APIs because they think it's a great set of APIs. There are some projects like "wine" that try to implement it to offer compatibility, and it took them many years to make it mostly work. Would it have been better for society as a whole if Windows had implemented System V APIs instead of their own, proprietary APIs? Monopolies are the other avenue to introduce new protocols and formats, but apart form that, OSS seems to be the main pathway to introduce them.