Debian Social Contract amendments

Tuesday, April 27th, 2004

There has been a vote on an amendment to the Debian Social Contract. The amdendment extends the non-free policy of Debian to cover not only software but just about everything about Debian. Where in the past documents and things such as firmware where apparentely allowed in the main archive even if they were not free (as in freedom), in the future this will not be allowed anymore.

The voting came out in favour of adopting the new amendment. Therefor Debian will be removing all non-free non-software elements from the main archive and move them to the non-free (or contrib?) archive. Chances are that this process will greatly delay the next stable release of Debian: Sarge.

Although I thought that Debian would completely drop the non-free archive, it seems that they will continue providing non-free to the masses. Like before, the non-free archive will not be an official part of Debian GNU/Linux.