Debian Free Software Guidelines - History

History

The DFSG was first published together with the first version of the Debian Social Contract in July 1997. The concept of providing a formal guarantee for the distribution's licensing policy was suggested by Ean Schuessler and the primary authors were Bruce Perens and several other Debian developers at the time.

The Open Source Definition was created by modifying the text of the DFSG soon afterwards. DFSG was preceded by Free Software Foundation's Free Software Definition. Once the DFSG became the Open Source Definition, Richard Stallman saw the need to differentiate Free Software from Open Source and promoted the Free Software Definition. Published versions of FSF's Free Software Definition existed as early as 1986, having been published in the first edition of the (now defunct) GNU's Bulletin. It is worth noting that the core of the Free Software Definition is the Four Freedoms, which clearly preceded the drafting and promulgation of the DFSG, but were unknown to its authors.

In November 1998, Ian Jackson and others proposed several changes in a draft versioned 1.4, but the changes were never made official. Jackson stated that the problems were "loose wording" and the patch clause.

As of 2011, the document has never been revised. Nevertheless, there were changes made to the Social Contract which were considered to affect the parts of the distribution covered by the DFSG.

The Debian General Resolution 2004-003, titled "Editorial amendments to the social contract", modified the Social Contract. The proposer Andrew Suffield stated:

The rule is "this resolution only changes the letter of the law, not the spirit". Mostly it changes the wording of the social contract to better reflect what it is supposed to mean, and this is mostly in light of issues that were not considered when it was originally written.

However, the change of the sentence We promise to keep the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution entirely free software into We promise that the Debian system and all its components will be free resulted in the release manager, Anthony Towns, making a practical change:

As is no longer limited to "software", and as this decision was made by developers after and during discussion of how we should consider non-software content such as documentation and firmware, I don't believe I can justify the policy decisions to exempt documentation, firmware, or content any longer, as the Social Contract has been amended to cover all these areas.

This prompted another General Resolution, 2004-004, in which the developers voted overwhelmingly against immediate action, and decided to postpone those changes until the next release (whose development started a year later, in June 2005).