The Tor Project's social contract: we will not backdoor Tor
by Cory Doctorow from on (#1Q9YA)
I first encountered the idea of "social contracts" for software projects in Neal Stephenson's seminal essay In the Beginning Was the Command Line, which endorsed the Debian project on the strength of its social contract: "As far as I know, Debian is the only Linux distribution that has its own constitution." (more")