No, they released x264 under GPL from the very beginning, the commercial licencing came much later and the reason they offer this is because it is how they (the

No, they released x264 under GPL from the very beginning, the commercial licencing came much later and the reason they offer this is because it is how they (the x264 authors) make money on x264, namely by offering proprietary licences for companies who wants to use x264 in proprietary projects. And there's a new x265 project (not by the same authors) which is using the exact same model, which is that they release it under GPL and will also be selling proprietary licences.