This social contract is intended to clearly describe the overall development policies and standards of the Gentoo Linux development team. Parts of this document have been derived from the Debian Social Contract, and is generally very similar to it except that certain parts have been clarified and augmented while other parts deemed redundant have been removed. Comments are welcome. Please send them to our gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list.

We will release our contributions to Gentoo Linux as free software, under the GNU General Public License version 2 (or later, at our discretion.) Any external contributions to Gentoo Linux (in the form of freely-distributable sources or binaries) may be incorporated into Gentoo Linux provided that we are legally entitled to do so. However, Gentoo Linux will never depend upon a piece of software unless it conforms to the GNU General Public License, GNU Lesser General Public License or some other license approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI.)

We will establish relationships with Free Software authors and collaborate when possible. We will submit bug-fixes, improvements, user requests, etc. to the "upstream" authors of software included in our system. We will also clearly document our contributions to Gentoo Linux as well any improvements or changes we make to external sources used by Gentoo Linux (whether in the form of patches, "sed tweaks" or some other form.) We acknowledge that our improvements and patches are much more meaningful to the larger Free Software community if they are clearly documented and explained, since not everyone has the time or ability to understand the literal changes contained in the patches, tweaks, etc. themselves.

We will keep our bug report database open for public view at all times. Reports that users file on-line will immediately become visible to others.