The definition has ten criteria, such as requiring freely accessed source code and granting the open-source rights to everyone who receives a copy of the program.
Covering both copyleft and permissive licenses, it is effectively identical to the definition of free software, but motivated by more pragmatic and business-friendly considerations.
[6] It adopted a closed rather than membership-driven organizational model in order to draft the definition and work together with a wider variety of stakeholders than other free or open-source projects.
The proposer Andrew Suffield stated:[11] 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:[12] This prompted another General Resolution, 2004–004,[13] 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).
Seven approved licenses are particularly recommended by the OSI as "popular, widely used, or having strong communities":[19] Most discussions about the DFSG happen on the debian-legal mailing list.
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[clarification needed], 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.
[20] Due to the GFDL invariant sections, content under this license must be separately contained in an additional "non-free" repository which is not officially considered part of Debian.
The debian-legal mailing list subscribers have created some tests to check whether a license violates the DFSG.