They get the tech for free, so why not?
More importantly, it keeps MPEG LA in check wrt. to increasing the fees. Monopolies have this tendency.
If VP8 pushes out H264, TI (and others) can just switch to it and save licensing fees.
Even if it doesn't but gains a significant popularity, it'll be a bargaining tool when/if MPEG LA tries to raise H264 licensing fees.
From my perspective?
As someone who might use some sort of video encoding technology in my software, I would rather not pay the licensing fees.
Not to mention that Google innovates with VP8 faster than all of the combined H264 actors (see e.g. the constraint quality encoding mode http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/03/vp8-constrained-quality-...).
