To be quite fair, the only reason the community adopted these is because it's the only format that works across all browsers. If Safari and IE had supported free video codecs they would have very likely supported that.

By the way, MP4 is a completely open standard (open does not equate 'free') and is free to use for videos that are also freely distributed. Of course there are also free and open source implementations of the codec. Being patent encumbered sucks but in principle there should be no practical limitation for gifs at least.