"Validity" is a legal term of art in patents. Agreeing not to challenge the validity of the patent means, e.g., that you won't file an IPR seeking invalidation on anticipation grounds. It doesn't require you to subscribe to any set of political beliefs.
> So, no, webm, VP8, VP9, Google’s new stuff, etc is not "free of patents", it just happens to have patents which most users don’t notice.
As I pointed out above, that isn't true except in the narrow sense of if you try to sue for the invalidity of the webm patents specifically, and then you'd lose your license to the webm patents and only the webm patents (never mind that if you tried to argue that a software patent was invalid because all software patents should be invalid the court would throw it out so fast that likely no one would notice what you did).
You can object to that narrow clause, but no one ever claimed the project was "free of patents", just that it was royalty-free and that it includes a patent license grant for any patents covering the code and format.
Moreover, as (again) I noted above, every Apache 2.0 licensed project has the same clause, so you have a lot more windmills you should be tilting at right now.
I’m more annoyed about Facebook (if you fight any patent in court that’s even related to any of theirs, you lose ALL licenses to anything they might own), but still.
