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.
In addition to the organization, there are very comprehensive policy manuals that guide everything about development and release, including the structure of the repositories and archives, as well as a number of related standards documents. Information on all of this is available at http://www.debian.org/devel/.
The means of achieving the goals of the Debian Social Contract is outlined in the Debian Constitution. It lays out the formal structure and decision-making process. The project has a full organizational structure that includes Officers, Distribution, Publicity, Support, and Infrastructure divisions, with specific positions and responsibilities. Although Debian is an all-volunteer organization, it is every bit as organized as any large corporate entity.
Above everything else, Debian developers believe in free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation. In essence, this definition ensures that users have the freedom to:
Debian is, at its heart, a totally free, volunteer-supported distribution. Unlike Ubuntu, Red Hat, or SuSE, it is not sponsored by any corporation. This does not mean it is any less organized. The Debian project is, in fact, well-organized, with a well-defined government, detailed standards and guidelines, and specified procedures for software release, maintenance, and support.
The name Debilm comes from the names of the project founder, Ian Murdock, and his wife Debra.
There are a couple of other things administrators should know about how Debian differs from other distributions before we get into details.
The Debian Packaging System (DPKG/DEB) was developed about the same time as the RPM, and has the same features, although they are implemented differently. DPKG refers to the original software packaging utility. This has been superseded by more flexible and user-friendly utilities, so this branch is often referred to by the extension used by the package files: DEB ( . deb). Some distributions in this branch have corporate sponsorship (Ubuntu is the most notable) and thus, have a unified administrative utility, similar to SuSE's YaST for example.
The Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) was developed by Red Hat in order to provide some structure for software management. It provides all of the customary software management features which are as follows:
The Softlanding Linux System (SLS) distribution, which evolved into the Slackware distribution, is one of the oldest. Distributions in this branch generally made minimal or no changes to the original software packages before including them. Distributions using this format generally provided no native software management and depended on third-party utilities for package management and administration. These utilities were readily available and often included, so this was not necessarily a disadvantage.
Linux distributions can be broken down into three branches, named from their original distribution or their package managers: SLS, RPM, and DPKG.
