Were unknown to its authors

were unknown to its authors.[5]

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[6] 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,[7] titled "Editorial amendments to the social contract", modified the Social Contract. The proposer Andrew Suffield stated:[8]

"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:[9]

"As [SC #1] 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,[10] 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).

Application[edit]

Software[edit]

Most discussions about the DFSG happen 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.

Non-"software" content[edit]

The DFSG is focused on software, but the word itself is unclear—some apply it to everything that can be expressed as a stream of bits, while a minority considers it to refer to just computer programs. Also, the existence of PostScript, executable scripts, sourced documents, etc., greatly muddies the second definition. Thus, to break the confusion, in June 2004 the Debian project decided to explicitly apply the same principles to software documentation, multimedia data and other content. The non-program content of Debian began to comply with the DFSG more strictly

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