Willingness to use it doesn't affect how free (as in beer) it is. It does affect how free (as in speech) it is, but that's not what the grandparent was arguing, and there's a huge difference between the two.
Actually, assuming that MPEG-LA allows this Cisco scheme to happen then any corporation who's at the MPEG-LA yearly cap could offer this same scheme for free (and no cost to themselves) too e.g. possibly Google, Microsoft, Apple.
