The situation surrounding the open-sourcing of Theora (née VP3) is remarkable similar to what would happen if something similar happens with VP8: neither codec was ever licensed to a customer.

The quality of the code released in the VP3 dump was abysmal, and while the Xiph people cleaned it up structurally, they didn't fix any of its warts, and they introduced new ones with their awful container format. Hopefully Google won't repeat that history.