What you’re paying extra for are timely security updates for community-maintained packages that aren’t an official part of the OS. Debian doesn’t provide that for free either. Debian doesnt provide it at all since they don’t have any paid options.
No. All the official packages in the main
repo get security updates from the Debian security team.
Only the packages in contrib
, non-free
and non-free-firmware
don’t have official security updates and rely on the package maintainers. These are not considered part of the Debian distro, and I don’t even have them enabled on my servers.
Out-of-the-box, Debian only enables the main
repo, plus the non-free-firmware
one if any of your devices require it (e.g. Nvidia graphics, Realtek Bluetooth, etc). You have to manually enable contrib
and non-free
, and by doing that, it’s assumed you know what you’re doing.
In the case of non-free
and non-free-firmware
, they can be closed source software (like the Nvidia drivers) or have a non-open-source license that doesn’t allow distributing modified versions. In those cases, the Debian team is unable to patch them even if they wanted to.