blogs are for people to express themselves, not a place for them to write great literary works.
The complaint isn't that blogs are not great works of literature, but that they're such poor specimens. Surely there's something between the average blog and "great literary works" to strive for?
Yeah, it's really awful that people can continue to benifit from thier creations for so long. IP should not go into the public domain untill the copyright holders chose for it to or the applicable law forces it to.
The problem is that powerful copyright holders have extended the "applicable laws" more than once, retroactively. The problem is that "applicable laws" have ceased to protect the public from IP hoarding.
What right do you have to claim it as "your" culture?
The right to sing a combination of notes, or to write a combination of words, is inherent. The people chose to give that right up in the form of a temporary monopoly called copyright, in exchange for more and better creativity. Specifically, copyright laws enabled a professional creative class that doesn't require private sponsorship, which is a very good thing so far, but the people did not sign away the right to sing those notes or write similar words forever.
One thing you need to understand is that copyright also prohibits anybody else from independently coming up with that series of notes later. That "anybody else" might in fact have released the song into "our culture" for free, but we've chosen to lock that part of "our culture" up temporarily to encourage the first comer.
[...] your attitude smells of slavery. ou want to force the IP creators to give away thier creations so that you do not have to expend any effort in acquiring it your self.
First of all, you need to apologize to slaves for trivializing their plight. If copyright was not protecting your livelihood, you can switch to another job that you can do. Slaves have no such choice, so don't even begin to compare software engineers or musicians without copyright to slavery. (No, it doesn't even "smell" of it.)
Secondly, I see no such sentiment in the post you are responding to. The complaint seems specifically directed at the "ones with complete contempt for the notion of the public domain, who have repeatedly bought extensions to the duration of copyright". I think we're talking about people who want to retroactively extend copyright, which is in its moral essence refusing to uphold their end of the deal.
Finally, speaking specifically to the software engineer, the public will derive zero benefit from your software after a certain time period (depending on the nature of your work, of course, but particularly if the sources are closed). Thus, it's not in the public's interest to protect your work for that long. We'd like it to be somewhat useful, for some time, in the public domain, in exchange for that protection. A balance needs to be struck so you will be encouraged to create, but it's not fair to expect to profit for as long as your creation is useful.
What's C? C's a portable Assembler that's been kludged up over the years. That's not an insult--sometimes what you want is a portable Assembler with 30 years of hacks on the side, because those hacks are what give it such power.
People like to think of C that way, but often it's because they don't understand ANSI/ISO C. Most such "kludgy hacks" that people have learned are formally undefined by the C language, reliant more on implementation quirks than anything else. Thus, I'd like you to cite a few examples of what you think you're talking about.
You also make it sound way too hard to write assembly language. It tends to be costlier and less portable, but it's not that hard to read and write at all.
I don't agree that polymorphism is the single distinction between OO and non-OO design. Other common features include encapsulation (of data and code into object) and inheritance. It's hard to call something "object-oriented" if it doesn't even use objects.
Also, there is some support for polymorphism in C. You can use function pointers to call different functions with the same parameters, and you can use varargs to call the same function with very different parameters.
I'm so tired of hearing "killer". Can we wait till something has actually been "killed" before declaring who the "killer" is? How many "iPod killers" have there been, and how dead is it?
I think given all considerations -- open standards, feature completeness, cost -- that OOo comes out on top everytime.
Speed? Last time I tried OO.o (a long time ago), it was visibly slower than MS Office on the same (slow) machine, particularly in the loading time department. Compatibility with existing documents? Yes, I know that Word doesn't open some of its own documents, but most of the time it'll work. I haven't used OO.o in a long time, so these are sincere questions, as you did say all considerations.
If your boss changes the year-end bonus system from one based on individual merit to one where everybody gets a much smaller bonus, would you consider it a punishment? The usage model, if it ignores the differences among vehicles, has the same "fairness" as the bonus for every employee.
Also, hybrid cars are not actually cheaper to operate. The cheapest Toyota Corolla costs about $14,000 MSRP and gets 32/41 mpg. The cheapest Prius costs about $21,000 MSRP and does 60/51 mpg. Assuming you only do city driving (where the Prius shines), you're getting 28 extra miles per gallon for an additional $7,000. At $2/gallon, you have to drive the Prius 98,000 miles more to make up the $7,000. In reality, where you're not always driving in a city, you may have to keep your Prius beyond 200,000 miles total (about 20 years the way I'm driving) before it gives you a dollar per mile advantage over the Corolla. This new tax model can make hybrids even less attractive.
does anybody know the etymology of the word "patriot" with respect to this legislation?
It is actually the USA PATRIOT Act, which is an acronym for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism".
No other OS today will run a program designed for an Operating System 10 years old while still having the features one would expect from a modern operating system.
Nonsense. I was using IBM's Visualization Data Explorer (which is basically a visual programming language plus IDE, a substantial program) in 1995 on HP-UX, which was built on top of Motif, X, and of course Unix (possibly POSIX, I don't know). IBM later opened its sources, and now it is available as OpenDX for AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, MacOS X, and Windows (including XP).
Now, Microsoft provides excellent binary compatibility with the older operating systems, so if you change the assertion to "...a program compiled 10 years ago..." you might have something. Binary compatibility is not so important when you have the source code.
back when HTML4 and CSS were in their infancy, Microsoft chose to support them, but did a crappy job at it. This set the precedent that now since developers had designed sites around these quirks, THEY COULDN'T FIX THEM.
This is also not true. From the IE blog:
In Internet Explorer 6 we introduced support for the strict doctype to allow us to improve our CSS support without breaking existing content. We expect to use this same technique in the future to allow us to make further improvements.
In other words, IE7 will be backward-compatible by default, but as compliant as it can be if you add the proper DOCTYPE tag.
The switching process usually invovles some sort of dual booting process which allows the newbie to gradually wean himself from Windows as he discovers Linux alternatives to programs he uses in Windows.
This is exactly the typical scenario I had in mind. We need to admit to ourselves that hardware incompatibility means that...
The final step in this case would be eventually buying a compatible video card
...is still asking for a bit of a leap of faith from the potential switcher. It is a barrier that some will not be willing to cross, especially if it involves tossing one expensive video card to buy another. What I perceive of your position so far is that this says the switcher is not "serious", and presumably can be ignored. This is the attitude that I'm addressing. About the only stereotypical Linux advocate response I haven't heard so far is "well, the newbie can apt-get gcc and start writing a video driver".;)
If you want newbies to switch at all, the process needs to be as "casual" as possible. Requiring a level of "seriousness" simply means some will go back to Windows, satisfied that there is no alternative for them.
How many "serious" switchers, by your definition of having actually replaced hardware before gaining substantial experience with Linux, have you ever met in your life?
If he considered himself innocent, he should not have entered a guilty plea.
What a fantasy world you live in. I'm not talking about Lee in particular, but in this world, people who cannot prove their innocence sometimes have to face a decision of doing a long prison term in "innocence" and doing a reduced sentence in "guilt".
You are in no position to criticize that sort of "dishonesty" unless you've chosen the "morally superior" path and paid dearly for it.
I can move my DIY piece of crap x86 just as fast as any Mini.
Consumer habits are horribly hard to predict. The reason I quoted Apple marketing in my response is to explain that they at least intended the Mini to be moved around. Whether or not users actually will do is a different question.
Also, the question is not going to be settled by a race between a Mac Mini user and you moving a computer 50 yards. The question is, given your current tendency (or lack thereof) to move your bigger PC around, would a small form factor computer make you move things around more casually or not. The speed at which you move the two computers may be the same; the inertia that must be overcome to make you decide to move may be different.
The cost of replacing the video card with one that is supported is marginal.
If our newbie cares about 3-D performance under Linux, then it's not unlikely that he spent good money on his ATI card. It's also not unlikely that he'll want a decent one to run under Linux.
he could always use Linux anyway with no (or poor) 3d support. If he can't handle buying a supported card or living without 3d, then he can petition ATI for better drivers.
Or he could continue using Windows. As I mentioned, people are not nearly as desperate to run from Windows XP and 2000.
anyone who seriously wants to switch, should not bitch about it after the fact.
What exactly constitutes "seriously wants to switch"? Why should a newbie commit to Linux before his old video card can even work? What you're asking for is bordering on religion.
In this world, you tell somebody that Linux is better, they believe you, try it out, and then make a commitment.
They should just cut their losses and buy an NVIDIA card.
No, in many cases "cutting their losses" means ejecting the live Linux CD, and rebooting to Windows. You may know how well worth the new video card Linux is, but how do you expect somebody who hasn't even gotten to try it to know that? Linux evangelists also need to understand that people are far less desperate to run away from Windows XP or 2000 than they were from Windows 98.
ATI's bad driver support does not negate the fact that Linux is better.
Sure, but it can certainly hide that fact very well. A lot of the complaints about how unstable Windows is really refers to third-party drivers, but Microsoft takes most of the heat. Life isn't fair that way.
It's simply because the movie industry has more power and influence with Congress than local retailers. (Which is shocking when you consider that Wal-Mart is a local retailer!)
No, the difference is more likely because Wal-Mart can more easily absorb the real cost of occasional shoplifting than the music industry can absorb the potential loss of profits from massive copyright infringement.
Let's put the question another way. If 1,000 terrorists each transport a tiny fragment of a nuclear bomb into a city and blows it up, which of them is guilty of mass murder?
All of them are, even if one of them just bought a screwdriver from Home Depot. Similarly, because of the ability and intent of reassembling that bit back into a copyrighted work without authorization, you've violated copyright. This doesn't mean that anybody who sends out a 1 bit infringes on every copyrighted work containing a 1 bit. There has to be a clear way of using that bit to infringe copyright, such as a formula or data format to re-generate copyrighted material with it as an input.
(By the way, this is just an intellectual exercise, putting aside my personal feelings about copyright law. I am also not a lawyer, so guilt and innocence here refer to what I think the world should be, not what it is.)
But does it make a difference if your desktop computer is 5 kg or e.g. 15? Since you don't move it too often it doesn't really matter at all.
Allow me to quote Apple's own marketing material:
Believe it or not, all this technology weighs just 2.9 pounds. Imagine... a desktop computer you can easily move from your study to the kitchen on a whim. Mac mini won't break your back when you want to shuffle things around.
which should make it pretty clear that the Mac Mini is intended to be moved around.
By the way, you completely missed CastrTroy's point, which is: do the size and weight of a desktop mask our actual need to move it around (in which case Apple might help redefine the home computer), or do we really not need to move it around, hence it was allowed to become big and heavy (in which case Apple is just wasting time cramming it into such a small space)? CastrTroy didn't say that computers are too heavy to move.
If a standard exists, it should be a result of evolution, not mandate.
Where do you get your "should"? A casual observer of the US cellular telephone industry would tell you what a horrible mess it has been, with multiple incompatible standards forcing duplicated coverage efforts. This results in a lot of money wasted, and a lot of customers frustrated.
In some cases, most notably where the alternatives do not differ greatly, a dictated standard is better than not having any at all. (This should be easy to understand, because when there is no clear superior alternative, evolution tends to become just random.) Does it really spell creativity to you where the "Preferences..." menu item can be found, for example?
Depends on what you want to keep of the old. If it's truly a historical artifact, do you really want the cell phone company to be in charge of it? Also, some of them make very good parks.
Where's something that benefits society that succeeded because of the patent system?
Are you asking for an invention that would be impossible without patents? How do you imagine anybody can prove that?
The patent system is a part of a system of incentives to invent. Other incentives include fame, indirect fortune, personal feelings of accomplishment, perhaps even religious satisfaction. It is unreasonable to require that patents be the sole enabler. The question is whether the system of incentives is better or worse with patents. The question is how much monopoly we grant to patents.
The people who most directly create new software are overwhelmingly against software patents. The primary parties in favor of them are large IP cartels who stand to gain by manipulating the IP market. Even within these cartels, the actual engineers who do the creation are against these sorts of patents.
You need to separate people who are against the patent system as it exists today (in the US, if you wish) from those who are against the concept of the monopoly in general. Indeed, most software engineers I've worked with don't think it's working.
Let's see if I can be clear enough for this thread. I think patents should be rarely granted. I think it should be possible for an experienced engineer to know of nearly every patent in a chosen field. I think patents should be easily readable.
But I also think that researchers should be able to profit from their work without becoming entrepreneurs, because I like the idea of professional researchers. Patents are one way to protect them.
What you're missing is that patents enable a class of inventors who do not wish to be entrepreneurs. IBM and Amazon want to build and sell products, so patents are incidental to that purpose, as are administrative overhead and marketing. A private research institute, for instance, may not want to deal with all that.
The question then, is how we can preserve this class of inventors without forcing them to become entrepreneurs? We need to answer this question before throwing out patents wholesale.
You're conveniently ignoring the fact that a large portion of MP3s success was due to the widespread ignorance/ignoring of Fraunhofers patent rights. GIF is exactly the same story. MP3 was sucessful, but it succeeded in spite of it's patent burden, not because of them.
I'm not ignoring anything. I'm saying that MP3 may not have existed (or would be much delayed) without Fraunhofer knowing that it can make some money back.
If you are fundamentally opposed to software patents, then what you have to prove is that folks like Fraunhofer would've done what they did when they did it even without patent protection. I'll be happy to believe you, because I like that world, but Vorbis being at least a decade late doesn't support your case.
Isn't that the audio format patented by Fraunhofer, which delayed the adoption of compressed music due to patent license fees which many companies couldn't afford?
Yes, but don't change the subject too quickly. You asked if society benefited from it, and I'd like your evaluation. Yes, it could've been better (people could invent cool stuff for free), but did society benefit or not from MP3?
Now moving on to your next concern, if it was so delayed, then why the hell didn't an unencumbered format beat it to market? Obviously it was still fast enough to attain dominance.
I speculate that Ogg Vorbis would have been much more popular, and highly adopted, had it come out much earlier.
But it didn't. Why not? Fraunhofer got the relevant patents in 1989, but Vorbis did not hit v1.0 until 2002. Thirteen years.
I don't like it any more than you do, but money makes many (not all!) things move, and patents bring money. Just because we don't like the way the world works doesn't mean that patents have not benefited society over and over again. (They've also done plenty of harm in other cases, which is why we desperately need patent reforms, but you weren't asking about that.)
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The complaint isn't that blogs are not great works of literature, but that they're such poor specimens. Surely there's something between the average blog and "great literary works" to strive for?
The problem is that powerful copyright holders have extended the "applicable laws" more than once, retroactively. The problem is that "applicable laws" have ceased to protect the public from IP hoarding.
What right do you have to claim it as "your" culture?
The right to sing a combination of notes, or to write a combination of words, is inherent. The people chose to give that right up in the form of a temporary monopoly called copyright, in exchange for more and better creativity. Specifically, copyright laws enabled a professional creative class that doesn't require private sponsorship, which is a very good thing so far, but the people did not sign away the right to sing those notes or write similar words forever.
One thing you need to understand is that copyright also prohibits anybody else from independently coming up with that series of notes later. That "anybody else" might in fact have released the song into "our culture" for free, but we've chosen to lock that part of "our culture" up temporarily to encourage the first comer.
[...] your attitude smells of slavery. ou want to force the IP creators to give away thier creations so that you do not have to expend any effort in acquiring it your self.
First of all, you need to apologize to slaves for trivializing their plight. If copyright was not protecting your livelihood, you can switch to another job that you can do. Slaves have no such choice, so don't even begin to compare software engineers or musicians without copyright to slavery. (No, it doesn't even "smell" of it.)
Secondly, I see no such sentiment in the post you are responding to. The complaint seems specifically directed at the "ones with complete contempt for the notion of the public domain, who have repeatedly bought extensions to the duration of copyright". I think we're talking about people who want to retroactively extend copyright, which is in its moral essence refusing to uphold their end of the deal.
Finally, speaking specifically to the software engineer, the public will derive zero benefit from your software after a certain time period (depending on the nature of your work, of course, but particularly if the sources are closed). Thus, it's not in the public's interest to protect your work for that long. We'd like it to be somewhat useful, for some time, in the public domain, in exchange for that protection. A balance needs to be struck so you will be encouraged to create, but it's not fair to expect to profit for as long as your creation is useful.
People like to think of C that way, but often it's because they don't understand ANSI/ISO C. Most such "kludgy hacks" that people have learned are formally undefined by the C language, reliant more on implementation quirks than anything else. Thus, I'd like you to cite a few examples of what you think you're talking about.
You also make it sound way too hard to write assembly language. It tends to be costlier and less portable, but it's not that hard to read and write at all.
Also, there is some support for polymorphism in C. You can use function pointers to call different functions with the same parameters, and you can use varargs to call the same function with very different parameters.
No, it can unreasonably raise expectations to the point that reality becomes underwhelming.
I'm so tired of hearing "killer". Can we wait till something has actually been "killed" before declaring who the "killer" is? How many "iPod killers" have there been, and how dead is it?
I think given all considerations -- open standards, feature completeness, cost -- that OOo comes out on top everytime.
Speed? Last time I tried OO.o (a long time ago), it was visibly slower than MS Office on the same (slow) machine, particularly in the loading time department. Compatibility with existing documents? Yes, I know that Word doesn't open some of its own documents, but most of the time it'll work. I haven't used OO.o in a long time, so these are sincere questions, as you did say all considerations.
Also, hybrid cars are not actually cheaper to operate. The cheapest Toyota Corolla costs about $14,000 MSRP and gets 32/41 mpg. The cheapest Prius costs about $21,000 MSRP and does 60/51 mpg. Assuming you only do city driving (where the Prius shines), you're getting 28 extra miles per gallon for an additional $7,000. At $2/gallon, you have to drive the Prius 98,000 miles more to make up the $7,000. In reality, where you're not always driving in a city, you may have to keep your Prius beyond 200,000 miles total (about 20 years the way I'm driving) before it gives you a dollar per mile advantage over the Corolla. This new tax model can make hybrids even less attractive.
It is actually the USA PATRIOT Act, which is an acronym for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism".
Nonsense. I was using IBM's Visualization Data Explorer (which is basically a visual programming language plus IDE, a substantial program) in 1995 on HP-UX, which was built on top of Motif, X, and of course Unix (possibly POSIX, I don't know). IBM later opened its sources, and now it is available as OpenDX for AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, MacOS X, and Windows (including XP).
Now, Microsoft provides excellent binary compatibility with the older operating systems, so if you change the assertion to "...a program compiled 10 years ago..." you might have something. Binary compatibility is not so important when you have the source code.
back when HTML4 and CSS were in their infancy, Microsoft chose to support them, but did a crappy job at it. This set the precedent that now since developers had designed sites around these quirks, THEY COULDN'T FIX THEM.
This is also not true. From the IE blog:
In other words, IE7 will be backward-compatible by default, but as compliant as it can be if you add the proper DOCTYPE tag.This is exactly the typical scenario I had in mind. We need to admit to ourselves that hardware incompatibility means that...
The final step in this case would be eventually buying a compatible video card
If you want newbies to switch at all, the process needs to be as "casual" as possible. Requiring a level of "seriousness" simply means some will go back to Windows, satisfied that there is no alternative for them.
How many "serious" switchers, by your definition of having actually replaced hardware before gaining substantial experience with Linux, have you ever met in your life?
What a fantasy world you live in. I'm not talking about Lee in particular, but in this world, people who cannot prove their innocence sometimes have to face a decision of doing a long prison term in "innocence" and doing a reduced sentence in "guilt".
You are in no position to criticize that sort of "dishonesty" unless you've chosen the "morally superior" path and paid dearly for it.
Consumer habits are horribly hard to predict. The reason I quoted Apple marketing in my response is to explain that they at least intended the Mini to be moved around. Whether or not users actually will do is a different question.
Also, the question is not going to be settled by a race between a Mac Mini user and you moving a computer 50 yards. The question is, given your current tendency (or lack thereof) to move your bigger PC around, would a small form factor computer make you move things around more casually or not. The speed at which you move the two computers may be the same; the inertia that must be overcome to make you decide to move may be different.
If our newbie cares about 3-D performance under Linux, then it's not unlikely that he spent good money on his ATI card. It's also not unlikely that he'll want a decent one to run under Linux.
he could always use Linux anyway with no (or poor) 3d support. If he can't handle buying a supported card or living without 3d, then he can petition ATI for better drivers.
Or he could continue using Windows. As I mentioned, people are not nearly as desperate to run from Windows XP and 2000.
What exactly constitutes "seriously wants to switch"? Why should a newbie commit to Linux before his old video card can even work? What you're asking for is bordering on religion.
In this world, you tell somebody that Linux is better, they believe you, try it out, and then make a commitment.
They should just cut their losses and buy an NVIDIA card.
No, in many cases "cutting their losses" means ejecting the live Linux CD, and rebooting to Windows. You may know how well worth the new video card Linux is, but how do you expect somebody who hasn't even gotten to try it to know that? Linux evangelists also need to understand that people are far less desperate to run away from Windows XP or 2000 than they were from Windows 98.
ATI's bad driver support does not negate the fact that Linux is better.
Sure, but it can certainly hide that fact very well. A lot of the complaints about how unstable Windows is really refers to third-party drivers, but Microsoft takes most of the heat. Life isn't fair that way.
No, the difference is more likely because Wal-Mart can more easily absorb the real cost of occasional shoplifting than the music industry can absorb the potential loss of profits from massive copyright infringement.
Let's put the question another way. If 1,000 terrorists each transport a tiny fragment of a nuclear bomb into a city and blows it up, which of them is guilty of mass murder?
All of them are, even if one of them just bought a screwdriver from Home Depot. Similarly, because of the ability and intent of reassembling that bit back into a copyrighted work without authorization, you've violated copyright. This doesn't mean that anybody who sends out a 1 bit infringes on every copyrighted work containing a 1 bit. There has to be a clear way of using that bit to infringe copyright, such as a formula or data format to re-generate copyrighted material with it as an input.
(By the way, this is just an intellectual exercise, putting aside my personal feelings about copyright law. I am also not a lawyer, so guilt and innocence here refer to what I think the world should be, not what it is.)
Allow me to quote Apple's own marketing material:
which should make it pretty clear that the Mac Mini is intended to be moved around.By the way, you completely missed CastrTroy's point, which is: do the size and weight of a desktop mask our actual need to move it around (in which case Apple might help redefine the home computer), or do we really not need to move it around, hence it was allowed to become big and heavy (in which case Apple is just wasting time cramming it into such a small space)? CastrTroy didn't say that computers are too heavy to move.
Form factor is a function. A 5 kg "portable MP3 player" the size of a briefcase, for example, wouldn't really hit the target market.
Where do you get your "should"? A casual observer of the US cellular telephone industry would tell you what a horrible mess it has been, with multiple incompatible standards forcing duplicated coverage efforts. This results in a lot of money wasted, and a lot of customers frustrated.
In some cases, most notably where the alternatives do not differ greatly, a dictated standard is better than not having any at all. (This should be easy to understand, because when there is no clear superior alternative, evolution tends to become just random.) Does it really spell creativity to you where the "Preferences..." menu item can be found, for example?
Depends on what you want to keep of the old. If it's truly a historical artifact, do you really want the cell phone company to be in charge of it? Also, some of them make very good parks.
Are you asking for an invention that would be impossible without patents? How do you imagine anybody can prove that?
The patent system is a part of a system of incentives to invent. Other incentives include fame, indirect fortune, personal feelings of accomplishment, perhaps even religious satisfaction. It is unreasonable to require that patents be the sole enabler. The question is whether the system of incentives is better or worse with patents. The question is how much monopoly we grant to patents.
The people who most directly create new software are overwhelmingly against software patents. The primary parties in favor of them are large IP cartels who stand to gain by manipulating the IP market. Even within these cartels, the actual engineers who do the creation are against these sorts of patents.
You need to separate people who are against the patent system as it exists today (in the US, if you wish) from those who are against the concept of the monopoly in general. Indeed, most software engineers I've worked with don't think it's working.
Let's see if I can be clear enough for this thread. I think patents should be rarely granted. I think it should be possible for an experienced engineer to know of nearly every patent in a chosen field. I think patents should be easily readable.
But I also think that researchers should be able to profit from their work without becoming entrepreneurs, because I like the idea of professional researchers. Patents are one way to protect them.
The question then, is how we can preserve this class of inventors without forcing them to become entrepreneurs? We need to answer this question before throwing out patents wholesale.
I'm not ignoring anything. I'm saying that MP3 may not have existed (or would be much delayed) without Fraunhofer knowing that it can make some money back.
If you are fundamentally opposed to software patents, then what you have to prove is that folks like Fraunhofer would've done what they did when they did it even without patent protection. I'll be happy to believe you, because I like that world, but Vorbis being at least a decade late doesn't support your case.
Yes, but don't change the subject too quickly. You asked if society benefited from it, and I'd like your evaluation. Yes, it could've been better (people could invent cool stuff for free), but did society benefit or not from MP3?
Now moving on to your next concern, if it was so delayed, then why the hell didn't an unencumbered format beat it to market? Obviously it was still fast enough to attain dominance.
I speculate that Ogg Vorbis would have been much more popular, and highly adopted, had it come out much earlier.
But it didn't. Why not? Fraunhofer got the relevant patents in 1989, but Vorbis did not hit v1.0 until 2002. Thirteen years.
I don't like it any more than you do, but money makes many (not all!) things move, and patents bring money. Just because we don't like the way the world works doesn't mean that patents have not benefited society over and over again. (They've also done plenty of harm in other cases, which is why we desperately need patent reforms, but you weren't asking about that.)