Interesting side note: I worked at Jasc Software 20 years ago in technical support, helping people with Paint Shop Pro 7 and Animation Shop.
Animation Shop still works great for creating AnimGIFs and PSP7 still works great for a complete 'vector+bitmap' graphics app. It's impressive that some software is so resilient.
But if you look at imgur.com or Tumblr you'll find GIF is used mostly for video clips and this results in multi-megabyte files with dreadful quality, e.g. http://ministryofgifs.org/
gfycat typically reports 15:1 compression improvement when converting to WebM.
How difficult it seems to pick a default codec for the web+mobile web?
EDIT: Looks like everyone is concerned with it being open source, but they don't want to pay for it? Or they can pay for it and get a commercial license. Either way, you should be forced to pay! XD