It's not about "can't afford it", it's solely about "doesn't fit their business model".

This is in great, big letters on Mozilla's home page:

" We Are Building a Better Internet

And we’re dedicated to keeping it free, open and accessible to all. "

Not to mention that if they did pay for the license, I'm not sure that it would propagate down to forking projects. If you can't fork Firefox, that significantly impedes the utility of its open-source development model.

Very, very good point. Not everyone uses official Firefox binaries.

What should happen instead, MPEG-LA should give a perpetual license to all non-profit or open source developers of anything whatsoever.

Chromium is open source and Chrome supports AAC. What do they do? Can Firefox do that too?

Title is link-bait. Article makes a good case for Safari and IE supporting OGG as well. Author just wants a good, standard format without fees.

Heh, guess you're right. Edited.

We'll have WebCL in all modern browsers before we will have a format for compressed audio that works on all browsers.

Arguing over what format to support is pointless, we will be able to ship our own (fast, secure) decoders before there will be any consensus on what compressed video/audio formats to support.

Actually, WAV files can contain compressed content in a wide variety of formats, including MP3. WAV is a container format, not an audio format per se.

You're right, I meant PCM WAV really. You can put MP3 in a WAV container, but it doesn't change the licensing situation.

Ogg, not OGG.