[sprout]

Who are they going to attack? As with Oracle's suit, you can bet Google will be chomping at the bit to invalidate anything they put in the pool, which doubtlessly would weaken their bread and butter MPEG patents.

And the thing is, hardware H.264 will almost certainly be in every phone built until the patents expire, so ragging on a free alternative is just going to jeopardize their existing revenues, for a shot at the hacker community's websites like Wikimedia running H.264 and paying royalties - which will never happen anyway. Meanwhile most likely future for WebM is that some forward thinking companies serve WebM if you're using Firefox/Opera, but most are lazy, pay their H.264 tax, and require you to use IE/Safari/Chrome.