> Open source projects can't pay royalties. But people who use them can be forced to.That's right, and that's the reason to avoid any closed codecs.
> The idea that VP8/VP9 will gain traction and remain royalty free is laughable.
What's laughable? VP8 remains royalty free. VP9 will as well. In practice you can never guarantee that some submarine patent troll won't appear tomorrow to threaten you. But the same perfectly applies to H.264/H.265 so your argument is irrelevant, since such threat applies to virtually anything, but it doesn't mean one should stop innovating because of it.
