How are these comprable? Adobe has a patent agreement that says it won't sue you if you are implementing PDF or PostScript. Sure, it's maybe not absolute freedom, but it is markedly better than the situation with any of the encumbered audio codecs.<p>I'm not an adobe defender by any means, but the practical consequence of this is that there exists a lot of Free Software that supports PDF and PostScript (like Ghostscript)  and ships with all distros. The situation for H.264 is hardly similar.