WinRAR said it had a 40 day trial, but it actually never expired and you could continue using it forever for free. You never had to pay.

Which is why we have all the WinRAR memes.

Due to this, it was actually pretty goated, and remembered fondly by many.

I wonder if people have made mods to zhuzh up how the interface looks

Short answer: many have no licensing requirements for playback, only encoding. Sales are easy when you have a good codec that everyone can watch.

Something only becomes an intellectual property (intangible) asset if there is a law that says that said specific kind of thing can be intellectual property - the whole domain is an entirely artificial creation and there is no such thing as natural intellectual property.

So whilst French and EU do have the concept of intangible assets, it's irrelevant here because software patents aren't intellectual property according that those laws and hence are not "assets" and are thus not covered by such laws.

That's good to know that it's been updated but the reason it wasn't in the default binaries until the patent expired was because "it's free" isn't a defense from being sued by a patent holder.

Vlc including patented codecs is getting away with it despite the sword hanging over the project. Ffmpeg prefers to be safe because many free OpenSource projects have been shut down by patent holders.

Ehmmmm.... Vlc?

I honestly would buy a $300 copy of Windows Enterprise, provided it didn't have adware and other invasive things. Unfortunately, the last time I bought a premium Windows was back when Windows 7 Ultimate roamed the world.

These days, I just pirate a copy of Enterprise via RUFUS, and use ShutUp10 to kill whatever nastiness that Microsoft is up to. That sucks. I want to just buy a perfect Windows and get on with my day.

What those drivers do is patented in the US. See MPEG licensing. VLC is based in the EU which does not have a mechanism for software patents that do not solve a physical problem (moving bits around isn't patentable there) so they can avoid issues. Microsoft, Corel, and Nero would not be able to do that, they have assets in the US, even if it would only be a bank account.

I would not be surprised if codec licensing would not allow shipping with old and open codecs like MJPEG, Theora and AV1 with an addon for the proprietary codecs.