We believe that privacy, the free exchange of ideas, and equal access to information are essential to free and open societies. Through our community standards and the tools we create, we provide means that empower all people to protect and advance these ideals.
All the components of Tails that we create ourselves are, and will be, licensed in a manner consistent with the [Debian Free Software Guidelines](https://www.debian.org/social_contract).
Bug fixes, code improvements, Debian packaging, as well as work on usability issues will be sent upstream whenever possible. This way, our modifications will benefit others and can be improved upon further by a wider audience of people.
We want to produce Tails in a way that encourages participation, which requires publicly documenting what can be improved.As Tails is created in such a transparent manner, anyone is encouraged to participate, review it and point out problems.
We will always do our best to create secure and usable tools. We will never willingly include backdoors or malicious software nor will we cooperate with any entity wanting us to harm our users.
Whenever severe security issues are reported to us in private, we will test them and ensure we promptly fix these issues. We will notify our users whenever such an issue has been reported to us. However, for the security of our users, we might not disclose such a severe issue before releasing a fix.