> completely free alternative to h264
As a user H.264 was already free. As a developer H.264 was already free.
As a user H.264 was already free. As a developer H.264 was already free.
Or try to make a website that serves a lot of H.264 video and then come back and tell us how free H.264 is.
More generally, this is a video format we're talking about. "Free as in speech" is a huge deal. Speech is what it's for, for crying out loud.
And in exchange I get significantly poorer quality video.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/142796-how-to-play-dvds...
Meanwhile those who doesn't want to pay for the priviledge of the better quality h.264 offers (and likely h.265 in comparison with vp9) will be able to use a free codec, hopefully one which will be standarised under HTML5 and thus supported across all HTML5 compliant software.
See, it works out for everyone.
They also reserved the right to start charging for free videos (you remember when Apple fought against the MPEG-LA when they tried that with AAC audio codec, right?). They only made that permanently free a few months after WebM was announced.