Save time and minimise licensing headaches with REUSE
REUSE helps make a project's licensing and copyright status more
transparent, ensure that third-party code is properly attributed, and
make the project's code easily reusable. This tool is currently used
worldwide and its specification has been adopted by several corporate
and institutional projects. We spoke to Matija Šuklje of Liferay
International, one of the companies that has adopted REUSE.
REUSE is a set of best practices
to simplify Free Software licensing, making licensing easy for humans
and machines alike. It helps developers with simple guidelines for
declaring their copyright and the conditions for reusing code, and
provides help documents and low-threshold tools to get the job done.
Led by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), this initiative seeks
to solve a fundamental issue that Free Software licensing has at the
very source: what license is a file licensed under, and who owns the
copyright? A set of best practices and the helper tool make the task of
adding this legal information in every single file of the project a
simple practice.
Since its first release in 2017, the number of projects implementing
REUSE in their workflows is steadily increasing. Liferay is one of the
companies that use and sponsor REUSE so we talked with its Legal
Director and Associate General Counsel (FOSS & Community), Matija
Šuklje.
“When we switched to REUSE that kind of snowballed a lot of the internal
processes to streamline our licensing documents, and to streamline some
technical development, which caused us in turn to save a lot of
engineering time and even shortened negotiations and sales cycles
because things were much clearer”, explains Mr. Šuklje.
REUSE Software new version
REUSE is constantly evolving and
improving. The alpha version v3.1.0a1 of the REUSE tool was released a
couple of weeks ago containing the new REUSE.toml
functionality, and soon REUSE Specification v3.2 will be released.
“The version 3.2 of the REUSE specification adds a long-awaited
improvement in the form of REUSE.toml that helps projects declare their
licensing with heightened flexibility and reduced ambiguity. Furthermore, the
new TOML format is much easier to parse for third parties, allowing them
to read and modify this file with their own tooling”, explains
Carmen Bianca Bakker, coordinator of this initiative.
More and more organisations, companies, and individuals are using REUSE
and benefiting from the growing ecosystem of its specification, its helper
tool, its API and all the documentation. As using REUSE does not require
registration, there are not precise numbers about its users but we know
that it is being adopted by:
The REUSE project is based on its community and the people who support
and adopt it! The contribution of all our FSFE supporters also allows
our continuing work on REUSE as well as on our other activities. You can
join them by becoming an FSFE
supporter (and enabling our long-term work), you can spread the word
among your friends and convince them to support our work with a small donation,
and you can contribute to Software
Freedom in many other ways. Your support enables our work!
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