Translations:Essays:Why the FSF does not consider Debian as a free distribution/90/en

The Debian Project develops a free GNU/Linux distribution that respects the freedom of its users. It's not uncommon for software, the source code of which is distributed under this or that free license, to contain non-free components. In this case, the software is cleaned before being released into Debian. The Free Software Foundation (FSF), in turn, maintains a list of free GNU/Linux distributions, but oddly enough, Debian is not there. The fact is that Debian does not meet some criteria for getting on this list and we have to figure out which ones. But first, you need to understand how all this intellectual work is justified. In other words, why bother trying to get on some lists and this one in particular?