H.264 Licensing And Free Software
In other words, if you're an end user in a country where software patents (or method patents) are enforceable, and you're using software that encodes or decodes H.264 and the vendor is not on the list of licensees, the MPEG-LA reserves the right to sue you, the end user, as well as the software vendor or distributor.
more on weblogs.mozillazine.org
Most likely in the short term it end with videos being served with <video> tag, using H.264 in Apple world, and with Flash elsewhere. So much for interoperability.
