So that's the thing. I'm all for royalty-free encoders, but the only way to know if an algorithm is really royalty-free is for it to be older than the current maximum patent age. I believe that Daala is being designed to be royalty-free, but that's not measurable in advance.

There are other good reasons to support Daala, and explicitly building something to avoid royalty issues is certainly laudable (esp. compared to explicitly doing the opposite), but you can't just go and guarantee that something new is royalty-free, and it's frustrating to see the community make exactly those sorts of statements.