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Currently, Debian does distribute Mono, VLC and ffmpeg, I'm not aware of the codecs you speak of.

(Oh, and I do use Debian, five days a week, but I don't see how that's relevant to my question.)

They didn't - last I knew - distribute LAME or other MP3 encoders. I think the patent enforcement situation has changed since that call was originally made, but earlier (late 90's, early 2000's), the patent owners were enforcing patents for encoders but not decoders.

Isn't this one reason for the existence of http://debian-multimedia.org ?

It is a version of Firefox with the branding removed as that portion has a copyright by Mozilla. This project started in 2004-2005.

I actually thought the policy in the original post has always been Debian's policy.

Mozilla has trademark rights over the Firefox name and logo, and they license the logo's image file under a proprietary copyright license. It has nothing to do with patents, so the new policy does not affect that issue at all.

Have you used it recently?

You can taint your install with pretty much anything.

I have access to more firmwares blobs than with Ubuntu.