Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

could prove disastrous to his business, given that at the time, the commercial future of free software was entirely uncertain. Schuessler (himself a business owner) was both amused and disturbed by Young’s answer, and with other developers at the conference, he decided that it would behoove Debian to offer such a written guarantee.
    If immediate inspiration for the Social Contract was a conversation that brought to light two divergent interpretations of accountability to a wider community of technical users, the time was quite ripe in Debian for users to accept such a contract. As the project grew larger, many felt that the group had outgrown “The Debian Manifesto.” Many developers felt it was especially important to clarify their position on free software, for there was a small group clamoring to distribute nonfree software or risk losing users to the other distributions that did so. Thus when the Social Contract was proposed, it seemed like an ideal opportunity to clarify the project’s goals to both outsiders and newcomers joining in large numbers.
    Led by Perens, who wrote large chunks of the document, developers produced a statement of intent that helped define Debian’s unique role within a larger field of production. A crisp and short document, the Social Contract makes four promises and gives one qualification:
    “Social Contract” with the Free Software Community
    Debian Will Remain 100% Free Software
    We promise to keep the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution entirely free software. 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.
    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.
    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.
    Our Priorities Are Our Users and Free Software
    We will be guided by the needs of our users and the 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 object to commercial software that is intended to run on Debian systems, and we’ll allow others to create value-added distributions containing both Debian and commercial software, without any fee from us. To support these goals, we will provide an integrated system of high-quality, 100% free software, with no legal restrictions that would prevent these kinds of use.
    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.
    This charter is a strong statement of intent concerning Debian’s role, commitments, and goals, declared notably beyond the Debian project to the users of this distribution. It elevates the virtues of transparency and accountability, and seeks to foster a commonwealth that upholds the production of free software and the pragmatic needs of users. Although the charter affirms a well-defined moral commitment to free software and a community of users, it also formulates, in its last provision, the pragmatic limits to such “ideological” adherence, sanctioning to a limited degree the use of nonfree software by providing a place for it. In part, this decision reflected the state of free software during the period when the