Mozilla is just Google from a financial perspective, it's not an independent org, so the financing point stands.

H.264 was something like >90% of all video a few years ago and wasn't it free for streaming if the end user wasn't paying? IIRC someone also paid the fees for an open source version. There were pretty good licensing terms available and all the big players have used it extensively.

Anyway, my point was only that expecting Google to develop every piece of tech in the world and give it all away for free isn't a general model for tech development, whereas IP rights and patent pools are. The free ride ends the moment Google decide they need more profit, feel threatened in some way or get broken up by the government.

Part of the reason h.264 was such a big percentage of video was that they messed up the licencing of the follow up so badly which was supposed to supplant it.

Not that the licencing of h.264 wasn't a mess too. You suggest it was free for web use but they originally only promised not to charge for free streaming up until 2015 and reserved the right to do so once it was embedded in the web. Pressure from Google/Xiph/etc's WebM project forced them to promise not to enforce it after that point either.

https://www.wired.com/2010/08/mpeg-la-extends-web-video-lice...

Cisco paid for a binary version of a decoder that could be downloaded by Firefox as a plugin. They could only do so because of a loophole around a cap in fees that they were already hitting so it wouldn't cost them more to supply to every Firefox user.