Use and distribution of implementations requires a license (though, curiously, x264 seems to get a pass), so using the decoder will require a license as with using a closed-source one.
If x264 does, so does VLC, mplayer, ffmpeg, gstreamer, and dozens of other applications that use video and audio decoders in Linux. Fortunately quite a lot of the world is not the United States, and today VLC is the world's second most popular media player and has never paid one cent in patent licensing fees.
But of course, yes, being open source does not magically exempt you from patent laws in countries with insane, broken patent laws. In practice, if you want to make a large-scale commercial application that will be distributed in the US that uses x264, you will probably need to pay for an MPEG-LA license. They're quite cheap, though: 0 cents per unit up to 100k units, 20 cents per unit after that until 5 million, and 10 cents per unit after that.
Largely, the question of whether a distro contains any particular piece of software is whether the people who run the repositories are willing to host it. This applies both to possibly-patented software, but also to libraries like DeCSS (necessary to play DVDs) that violate the laws in some countries, but not others.
You're right, of course. While I believe that the MPEG-LA's enforcement practices are not non-discrimatory as it's claimed to be, that's a different discussion, and it wasn't appropriate to single x264 out that way.
No, it's noncommercial (really not user-monetized) streaming of video that's free. Shipping H.264 hardware requires paying licenses regardless of whether it's a commercial situation or not. For software, if the patents are enforceable in your jurisdiction, it's the same thing.
If x264 does, so does VLC, mplayer, ffmpeg, gstreamer, and dozens of other applications that use video and audio decoders in Linux. Fortunately quite a lot of the world is not the United States, and today VLC is the world's second most popular media player and has never paid one cent in patent licensing fees.
But of course, yes, being open source does not magically exempt you from patent laws in countries with insane, broken patent laws. In practice, if you want to make a large-scale commercial application that will be distributed in the US that uses x264, you will probably need to pay for an MPEG-LA license. They're quite cheap, though: 0 cents per unit up to 100k units, 20 cents per unit after that until 5 million, and 10 cents per unit after that.
Largely, the question of whether a distro contains any particular piece of software is whether the people who run the repositories are willing to host it. This applies both to possibly-patented software, but also to libraries like DeCSS (necessary to play DVDs) that violate the laws in some countries, but not others.