Question about LAME, Non technical question
 

I have a quick question. I am attempting to run my system with as little propriatory software as possable. At present I am only using the nvidia drivers and a few games e.e. ET, UT2004.

My qustion is, I understand many distributions choose not to distribute the LAME package directly in the distribution because of reasons to do with patents and the DMCA and things. Now my questions, is LAME Free Software, or is it propriatory? I know LAME has a sourceforge page, but is it entirly free software orare there non gpl components within it?

My second question is in regards to the mplayer w32 codecs packages. Are these free software? Were the codecs reverse engineered in order to provide the codec support or again do they contain non GPL code?

I hope someone can clariffy this for me.

Thanks in advance

Michael.

as lame.sf.net states, it is now fully compliant with the LGPL http://lame.sourceforge.net/about.html

mplayers w32codecs themselves are not reverse engineered, as they are just the orignal windows dll files and nothing more. as they are the original dlls they are still legally subject to the original vendors license terms, most of which are being somehwat violated in their use.

what about vlc? Is this entirly Free Software or is its support for the same as mplayer?

why not just look at their homepage?? LQ.org is not a human search engine.