Debian is a large, complex operating system, and a huge open source project. It’s thirty years old now.

Debian wants to be a high-quality, secure general purpose operating system that consists only of free and open source software that runs on most kinds of computers that are in active use in the world. [...] The only real choice Debian makes here is on whether the software is free and whether it’s plausible for Debian to maintain a high quality package.

Debian is a democracy in its governance and power structure. It has a formal constitution.

Debian is self-contained without bundled libraries, has a social contract.

Because Debian is huge, the project ships slowly.