Yeah downloading an OS that couldn't play MP3's by default, and required you to jump through hoops to let it play them, because said distro was avoiding law suits, Just like how Audacity didn't ship with LAME, but required you to supply your own dll. Yes patents had zero effect on the User experience.
yes. of course patents impact UX. if patents didn’t make things more difficult for engineers, then they’d be worthless, and in open source that burden on the devs gets passed through to the users.
a reasonable person might conclude that patents are a bad thing as a result. like it or not, HEVC is patented and that’s not changing anytime soon: but do we decide to develop tools around it, or banish it?
that any users actually went through the awful UX of downloading codecs is some evidence that mp3 support was valuable to them. is this still the case, today with HEVC, or not?
if the argument was really as simple as “HEVC is bad UX”, we wouldn’t have this discussion: nobody would use something with bad UX if they didn’t feel compelled to for some other reason. why anyone would feel compelled to, is the more interesting discussion.
