There's no legal issue with using it yourself. Debian's problem is that, as a distro, they are creating a single product - the Debian operating system. Debian

There's no legal issue with using it yourself. Debian's problem is that, as a distro, they are creating a single product - the Debian operating system. Debian could even ship you something that compiles perf against libbfd on your own system. This is the approach they take with ZFS and Linux, which are under incompatible licenses (CDDL and GPLv2): https://bits.debian.org/2016/05/what-does-it-mean-that-zfs-is-in-debian.html https://bits.debian.org/2016/05/what-does-it-mean-that-zfs-i... A company is generally a single legal person and so there's no "distribution", but https://www.jolts.world/index.php/jolts/article/view/66/125 https://www.jolts.world/index.php/jolts/article/view/66/125 is a law review article that discusses the complexities here. If you employ contractors, or if the company as a whole is purchased, the answer is apparently blurrier.