Appendix 8: What is Free Software

The following definition of Free Software is copyright c

  1997  Software in the

Public Interest  and is printed here with the author's permission. The project

participants overwhelmingly voted to adopt this declaration on the 4th of July,

1997. What follows is the entire document.

DEBIAN'S  SOCIAL CONTRACT  WITH THE FREE SOFTWARE COM 

MUNITY

We are Software In The Public Interest, producers of the Debian

GNU/Linux system. This is the social contract we offer to the free software

community.

1. Debian Will Remain 100% Free Software

We promise to keep the Debian GNU/Linux distribution entirely free soft 

ware. As there are many definitions of free software, we include the guidelines

we use to determine if software is  free  below. 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.

2. We Will Give Back to the Free Software Community

When we write new components of the Debian system, we will license them as

free software. We will make the best system we can, so that free software will be

widely distributed and used. We will feed back bug fixes, improvements, user

requests, etc. to the  upstream  authors of software included in our system.

3. We Won't Hide Problems

We will keep our entire bug report database open for public view at all times.

Reports that users file on line will immediately become visible to others.

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