"Steve Winslow" <swinslow@...> writes:

I expect we'd want to be a bit specific about what we mean by "is
included in the distro". For instance, for Debian I'd think `main` would
be covered, `non-free` would not, and I don't know for `contrib`.

Debian Developer here.

The contrib archive area has the same license inclusion criteria as main.
The distinguishing factor for contrib is that the packages are allowed to
depend on non-free software (either via package dependencies or via
downloading it from elsewhere; often packages in contrib are installers
that download the actual software from some web site). contrib doesn't
have its own separate licensing rules.

You are correct that non-free does not count as included in Debian.
Formally, inside the project, it is not part of our distribution. (This
is also true of contrib, but since it has the same licensing rules for
main it doesn't really matter for this discussion.)

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@...) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>