Considering the amount of bandwidth Google spends on streaming YouTube content, this move is far from altruistic.
Who cares? Companies are allowed to make the world a better place without having to self-flagellate themselves. Google could easily have just paid the H.264 licensing fees and told Mozilla to toss off, or even built VP8 support into Chrome and used YouTube to force-feed it to the world. They chose to cooperate, and should be praised for that.
I don't see how it's an "uphill battle" to convince anyone they should use a free standard instead of paying million of dollars in licensing fees
Several companies, most notably Apple, have already spent what must be millions of dollars on licensing fees and hardware. Regardless of which is a better long-term choice, it can be very difficult to reverse that much momentum. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of non-consumer multimedia equipment which is designed to use H.264.
Additionally, VP8 does not have much application support yet. It'll take a while for codecs to be written, debugged, and distributed to users. There may be significant lag time before VP8 displaces Theora among F/OSS users, or H.264 on OS X.
They chose the path that would lead to the fastest adoption of the technology which lowers their bandwidth costs. Keeping the technology Chrome-only is against their financial interests.
Apple and MS pay yearly licensing fees for H.264. As soon as they adopt VP8, they can stop.
Additionally, VP8 does not have much application support yet. It'll take a while for codecs to be written, debugged, and distributed to users. There may be significant lag time before VP8 displaces Theora among F/OSS users, or H.264 on OS X.