Debian Free Software Guidelines

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The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) is a set of guidelines that the Debian Project uses to determine whether a software license is a free software license, which in turn is used to determine whether a piece of software can be included in Debian. The DFSG is part of the Debian Social Contract. The Open Source Definition was created from the DFSG. These guidelines are:

Free redistribution
Inclusion of source code
Allowing for modifications and derived works
Integrity of the author's source code (as a compromise for the likes of TeX)
No discrimination against persons or groups
No discrimination against fields of endeavor, like commercial use
The license needs to apply to all to whom the program is redistributed.
License must not be specific to Debian, basically a reiteration of the last point.
License must not contaminate other software.
The GPL, BSD, and Artistic licenses are examples of licenses considered free.

1 Application
- 1.1 Non-software content
  - 1.1.1 Source
2 debian-legal tests for DFSG compliance
3 External links

[edit] Application

Most discussions about the DFSG happens on the debian-legal mailing list. When a Debian Developer first uploads a package for inclusion in Debian, the ftpmaster team checks the software licenses and determines whether they are in accordance with the social contract. The team sometimes confers with the debian-legal list in difficult cases.

[edit] Non-software content

The DFSG is focused on software, but the Debian project wants to apply the same principles to software documentation, multimedia data and other content. However, much documentation written by the GNU Project, the Linux Documentation Project and others licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License contain invariant sections, which do not comply with the DFSG when not interpreted as specific to software. This partially explains that a small proportion of Debian's content is generally considered to fail to comply with the DFSG. Following Debian General Resolution 2004-003, the non-software content of Debian will comply with the DFSG more strictly in Debian 4.0 and ulterior releases.

[edit] Source

There are controversies on what constitutes the source for multimedia files, such as whether an uncompressed image file is the source of a compressed image and whether the 3D model before ray tracing is the source for its resulting image.

[edit] debian-legal tests for DFSG compliance

The debian-legal mailing list subscribers have created some tests to check whether a license passes the DFSG. The common tests (as described in the draft DFSG FAQ) are the following:

"The Desert Island test". Imagine a castaway on a desert island with a solar-powered computer with an Internet connection that can't upload. This would make it impossible to fulfill any requirement to make changes publicly available or to send patches to some particular place. This holds even if such requirements are only upon request, as the castaway might be able to receive messages but be unable to send them. To be free, software must be modifiable by this unfortunate castaway, who must also be able to legally share modifications with friends on the island.
"The Dissident test". Consider a dissident in a totalitarian state who wishes to share a modified bit of software with fellow dissidents, but does not wish to reveal the identity of the modifier, or directly reveal the modifications themselves, or even possession of the program, to the government. Any requirement for sending source modifications to anyone other than the recipient of the modified binary — in fact any forced distribution at all, beyond giving source to those who receive a copy of the binary — would put the dissident in danger. For Debian to consider software Free it must not require any such excess distribution.
"The Tentacles of Evil test". Imagine that the author is hired by a large evil corporation and, now in their thrall, attempts to do the worst to the users of the program: to make their lives miserable, to make them stop using the program, to expose them to legal liability, to make the program non-free, to discover their secrets, etc. The same can happen to a corporation bought out by a larger corporation bent on destroying free software in order to maintain its monopoly and extend its evil empire. The license cannot allow even the author to take away the required freedoms!