I'm not sure you understand the problem here. They do not have a license to use h264, and even if they did, they could not afford to share it with you. Distributing patent-encumbered GPL code violates the spirit of GPL-2 and the letter of GPL-3. If you don't like it, campaign against software patents.<p>Chromium's approach to this is slightly better, but it's not all there yet. (Speculating here) Google can afford to distribute Chrome binaries with license protection, but they most likely track the total downloads in order to pay the fees. They cannot easily track the source, which is why Chromium doesn't ship with h.264 either. However, it uses ffmpeg, so if your system ffmpeg has h.264, you'll be able to use that (after this is fixed: <a href="http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=21318" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=21318</a>)<p>Ideally, that's the approach Mozilla would take, too. If not, as other posts mentioned, the distros that are willing to distribute non-free will eventually solve the problem.<p>As they say: Patches Welcome.