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Licensing of Debian

As mentioned in The social contract section, licensing is one of the central issues in Debian. All of the software in the official Debian distribution is released under any one of several free software licenses, usually some version of the GNU General Public License (GPL), a Berkeley BSD-style license, or some form of the artistic license used by some Perl developers.

What this means for administrators is that they can run Debian on as many different systems as they wish, without licensing fees, and provide as many copies as they wish to others, without restrictions (well, technically, there are restrictions, but mostly they are requirements that will keep the software free, in the spirit of the Free Software Foundation's definition).

This freedom does not prevent an administrator from running proprietary software in Debian. In fact, such freedom is a part of the social contract. The only restrictions are whatever that software's license states.

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