The Debian Social Contract is a document which frames the moral agenda of the Debian project. The values outlined in the Social Contract provide the basic principles for the rules set forth in the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Those guidelines serve as the basis for the Open Source Definition.
Debian believes that the makers of a free software operating system should provide certain guarantees when a user entrusts them with control of a computer. These guarantees include:
- Ensuring that the operating system remains open and Free.
- Giving improvements back to the community which made the operating system possible.
- Not hiding problems with the software or organization.
- Staying focused on the users and the software that started the phenomena.
- Making it possible for the software to be used with non-free software.
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or contract:
“The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self.... The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.”
—Harold Bloom (b. 1930)
“Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.”
—Isadora Duncan (1878–1927)