Just wanted to flag that as of today Fraunhoffer has acknowledged the expiry of their MP3 patent portfolio and the termination of their commercial licensing program ( https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audiocodecs/mp3.html ). As such there’s no longer any legal hurdle to LAME (or any other MP3-based technology) being included in a project or product.
I don’t think I’m alone that LAME is often the only additional package I need to manually add after a clean install, hopefully there’s enough others in the same boat to get it included in the distro going forward (or at least added to the official repos).