Debian Will Remain 100% Free Software
We promise to keep the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution
entirely free software.
preserve your right to freely use, modify, and
distribute Debian operating system distributions.
As there are many definitions of
free software, we We include the guidelines we use to determine
if software a work is "free" below in
a document called the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
Every work contained in our distributions will satisfy those guidelines.
We will support our
users who develop and run non-free software on Debian, but
we will never make the system depend on an item of non-free
software.
When we write new components of the Debian system, we will
license them
as free software freely in a manner consistent with the
Debian Free Software Guidelines. We will make the best system
we can, so that free software and other works will be widely distributed and
used. We will feed back bug-fixes communicate bug fixes, improvements, user
requests, etc. to the "upstream" authors of software
and other works
included in our system.
We Won't Will Not Hide Problems
We will keep our entire bug-report bug report database open for public
view at all times. Reports that users file on-line online will
immediately promptly become visible to others
without requiring manual approval. Project
discussions will be held in forums open to public participation
except where absolutely necessary. We are committed to transparency
and accountability in our decision-making processes.
Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software
We will be guided by the needs of our users and the
free-software free software community. We will place their interests first
in our priorities. We will support the needs of our users
for operation in many different kinds of computing
environment. We won't will not object to commercial software that is
intended to run on Debian systems, and we'll we will allow others to
create value-added distributions containing both Debian and
commercial software, without any fee from us. To support
In furtherance of
these goals, we will provide an integrated system of
high-quality , 100% free software, works of software and other materials with no legal restrictions
that would prevent these kinds of use uses of our operating system distributions.
Programs That Don't Meet Our Free-Software Standards
We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of
programs that don't conform to the
Debian Free Software Guidelines.
We have created "contrib" and "non-free"
areas in our FTP archive for this software. The software in
these directories is not part of the Debian system, although
it has been configured for use with Debian. We encourage CD
manufacturers to read the licenses of software packages in
these directories and determine if they can distribute that
software on their CDs. Thus, although non-free software
isn't a part of Debian, we support its use, and we provide
infrastructure (such as our bug-tracking system and mailing
lists) for non-free software packages.