Failed attempts of Embrace, Extend & Extinguish
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MP3: The patents on MP3 have expired and the format is still relevant even though we have more efficient successors, even patent-free successors like Ogg and Opus, but the format is still ubiquitous.
h264: The patents only have 4 years of life left in them and it's still relevant and it's like the MP3 of video and it was a real gamechanger when it first came out, it was 4x as efficient as Mpeg2 and before Mpeg2, there was VHS for home media and the expiration of this patent would help with libre codecs, I remember it was a big deal that Theora couldn't look at future frames to do compression, so that would be helpful. Only just recently we had a big codec efficiency jump that we had from Mpeg2 to h264, h266 was just ratified this year, but I think the standards consortium is painting themselves into a corner without fixing the patent licensing issue. all of the browsers apart from a patent-free build of Firefox agreed to support h264 for html5 video and even Microsoft's browser is yet to support h265. Devs are just using the h264 base because it's so ubiquitous and dealing with the patents until they expire.
USB 2.0: The patents expire next year and the USB consortium is destroying their own patented standards and creating consumer confusion after USB 3.0.
HDMI 1.0: it only has 3 years of life in the patent and most monitors are still 1080p, hell the most common resolution is 1366x768. The HDMI licensing is weird, if you want to pay the license for 100 products with HDMI, it would cost you $5,250 ($52.50 per unit) for the 'right' to use the connector and protocol but 10,000 would cost you $16,500 ($1.65 per unit) and 10,001 would cost you $11,500.15. ($1.15 per unit) Though that's not much of a failed attempt, the milk from the baseline HDMI cash cow is about to go dry and once that does, we might see more custom hardware and maybe cheaper and custom low volume SBCs.
XNA: The technology hasn't been updated in 9 years and is still relevant and I predict will still be relevant in 11 years after the patents expire.
I would also say retro consoles and PCs made before 1993 are also a failed attempt of embrace, extend & extinguish. Apart from the copyright on the system roms and people still make homebrew for those computing platforms and there's a resurgence in interest in older computing platforms, there's a kit for a Mini PET.
The big selling point for the old proprietary hardware isn't vendor lock-in, the selling point is the novelty of it and accuracy is less of a selling point, a lot of people with original hardware add optical drive emulation and HDMI Mods.
There's a lot of libre homebrew for older platforms. Also older computing reminds us of what computers are supposed to be like. the late 70's personal computer mentality was you were given a computing tape recorder, where you can play music made by others or you could also learn music theory and mess with sheet music instead of computers being a computing radio where it's dependent on centralization and whatever other people make and only people that have an expensive FCC broadcast license.
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