The whole idea of Mozilla and Google pushing vp8 (and later vp9) as the WebRTC standard was so that we would FINALLY have royalty free fully open source implementations which could be implemented/ported everywhere with no cost.

Atleast that's what I thought, but with this move Mozilla has shown that the 'royalty free open webstandards' which they touted as their goal was in reality 'as long as it's royalty free for _us_ to ship', as they are now switching sides one week before the voting and suddenly backs h264, which will only be royalty free if you accept a binary blob from Cisco.

I am truly disheartened by this move, and I can only assume that the hiring of Monty to work on Dalaa was just a calculated way of trying to mitigate the criticism by saying: 'look, we still believe in an open royalty free codec, sometime in the far future', which is weak as it's not as if Dalaa is even poised to compete with HEVC and VP9, but against whatever comes next.

And that is assuming that Dalaa will actually end up competitive at all, and if so, also having been able to avoid treading on the sadly insanely broad software patents that litter the video encoding field.

I think it's a huge betrayal of the principles they (Mozilla) have claimed to uphold, and the result is likely that we will end up with a binary blob for WebRTC standardisation come the vote, I'm so very disappointed.