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holders don't really distinguish between decoders or encoders (like
debian does). They rather distinguish between distributors making money
of it and non-commercial distributions, which they do not prosecute.
This all is of course only hearsay without quotes, so YMMV. However
getting reliable references to such claims is really hard.

FWIW, I don't think redistributing unmodified ffmpeg sources is a big
problem. We have done this since the mplayer package has been accepted
into the debian archive, and nobody even noticed this. If MPEG-LA or
other organisations managing mpeg related patents would have wanted to
stop debian doing this, they would have approached us already. I
therefore believe that it would be okay for debian to leave the sources
unmangled, but disable them from the resulting binaries. If we would go
that way, I could and would modify the 'stripping script' to run the
disabling at build time. I intend to enable users to locally create
replacement packages with full encoding support if some special
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS variables have been set. It would save users one step
if we could ship unmodified sources here.