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Do royalty free patents stop something from being free software? That would be surprising.

Opus' patents have patent retaliation clauses. It would be funny if those were incompatible with the GPL, because the GPL is essentially a "copyright retaliation" license.

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We ran the Opus license terms by the FSF before publishing them, and they confirmed that the terms were compatible with the GPL (v3 or otherwise).

Wasn't there an issue with a couple of companies filing IPR's with royalties that cover parts of Opus?

Please see the "Other disclosures" section on https://www.opus-codec.org/license/

You may also be interested in https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/defending-opus/ (warning: contains discussion of specific, unexpired patents).

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