Why shouldn't the people tha want to use the MPEG-2 patents pay the license fees? I don't play MPEG-2 on any of my RPis and am fine not paying them for those those that want to use that format.
It sucks a bit. I don't see it changing anytime soon. That's most of the reason I supported Parallela. That promises to be open, it probably won't be as much power as a nice GPU, but I want to compute with that hardware, and more problems will fit better. Plus I won't get trapped in some flawed API that has weird black boxes bugs and unpredictable performance issues.
They are optimizing for the British education market, not for some ideal libertarian education market in Somalia that can ignore patents.
And licensing agreements are a bitch. It might be against Broadcom's license with MPEG-LA to give enough info about implementing MPEG-2 regardless of jurisdiction.
Let them eat cake!