2. The Debian Archive

The Debian system is maintained and distributed as a collection of packages. Since there are so many of them (currently well over 15000), they are split into sections and given priorities to simplify the handling of them.

The effort of the Debian project is to build a free operating system, but not every package we want to make accessible is free in our sense (see the Debian Free Software Guidelines, below), or may be imported/exported without restrictions. Thus, the archive is split into areas 1 based on their licenses and other restrictions.

The aims of this are:

• to allow us to make as much software available as we can

• to allow us to encourage everyone to write free software, and

• to allow us to make it easy for people to produce CD-ROMs of our system without violating any licenses, import/export restrictions, or any other laws.

The main archive area forms the Debian distribution.

Packages in the other archive areas (contrib, non-free) are not considered to be part of the Debian distribution, although we support their use and provide infrastructure for them (such as our bug-tracking system and mailing lists). This Debian Policy Manual applies to these packages as well.