VLC being Really Free

[jwp1]

I am a bit confused.
I went to fsf.org and saw this wonderful ogg and vlc

I have been really wanting to run debian on a mips based laptop.
I had even heard that Richard Stallman used this very laptop from lemote.

One large stopping point for me was can it use VLC?
That is always the biggest problem.

I had heard that debian does not include vlc as the default player because it is not free. Because it plays mp3 format.
Is this just if you use vlc in America or is it free in Germany or the UK.

Or does it only matter for linux?
Because I run it on my usb stick with portable aps and it is there.
Portable aps until recently only used opensource which does not really mean free the way Richard Stallman says free.
Like free as in speech not free as in Beer.

many thanks

[3breadt]

VLC is not included by default in some Linux distributions, because of the same reason some codecs are not included by default. It probably has something to do with some technology of the codecs included in VLC being patented, at least in the US. But I'm no expert on that.

But VLC is free software by definition as everything in it is open source and its licensed under the GPL.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Free != patent-free