Are you saying that Debian s adherence to the philosophies of free software is only slighly strict I m sorry but I strongly disagree These are some indications of Debian being more than slightly strict when it comes to free software philosophies Only FOSS software in the main archive no binary blobs in the default installation This is already pretty unique when it comes to Linux distributions as most other distros include binary blobs Open development The development happens in the public this is different from eg Ubuntu where Mir was developped without the public knowing about it Decision making by the community This also contrasts it with Ubuntu where one company decides So I think one could say that Ubuntu s adherence to free software philosophies are slightly strict but Debian s is definitely more than that You are also saying that there is a problem with respect to the terminology GNU Linux Well not according to the Free Software Foundation the initiator of the GNU project According to the Debian website The FSF explicitly requested that we call our system Debian GNU Linux and that was when Debian still had binary blobs in its kernel