Bad faith: can't change Debian Social Contract (DSC) without unanimous consent of every joint author
10:00 Sat, 25 Oct 2025
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
In 2022, Debianists had a vote to allow some binary blobs to be included in the Debian installer images. GR 2022-3 on "non-free" firmware.
In my last blog, I examined how the use of the term "non-free" to describe purely binary artifacts is a social engineering attack. Real Debian Developers and the people who use our work have a very clear expectation that "non-free" describes source code without a fully free license. In Debian speak, the term "non-free" has nothing to do with binary blobs. People trying to use the term "non-free" for two unrelated concepts at the same time are causing confusion.
Nonetheless, this blog introduces another critical comment about the General Resolution (GR): the vote was not valid in the first place.
The original Debian Social Contract was adopted on 5 July 1997. Ever since then, people have worked together to create the Debian intellectual property through a process of joint authorship. In doing so, we waived our rights to royalties and we accepted the terms of the Debian Social Contract as one of the substitutes for payment.
Each new release of Debian is a derivative of the previous releases.
The influence of each Debian Developer is much bigger than the packages we published. We do a range of things, for example, mentoring newcomers and participating in discussions and votes about parts of the system that are shared between all packages. Many of those common features of Debian would be different in some subtle way if certain people had never been present in the first place.
After engaging in that creative process, there is no way that we can roll back Debian to separate the influence of the people who did not consent to change the Debian Social Contract.
Therefore, if the Debian Social Contract will ever be changed, it is necessary to have the consent of every Debian Developer who ever contributed or collaborated on Debian after 5 July 1997.
Consent is vital in contracts and agreements. People who did not vote for the change are not consenting. To understand the significance of this imagine a group of three men and two women. Can they vote for the women to be slaves to the men? Would such a vote be valid because over sixty percent support the outcome? If all five people in the group do not consent to this activity, it is probably a crime.
The only other way to proceed is to create some paraller project or fork that is not Debian at all with its own social contract. The derivative project could not be called Debian though.
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved. █