REUSE makes software licensing as easy as one-two-three
REUSE Specification 3.3 and REUSE tool 5.0.0 are released today, making
it even easier to license your code as Free Software. REUSE provides all
the tools and documentation that developers need to apply
standards-compliant and comprehensive licensing information to their
projects, without needing to be a legal expert.
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) started
REUSE in 2017 to make licensing easy,
comprehensive, unambiguous, and machine-readable. This toolkit consists
of a specification that standardises licensing, a tool that helps
achieve and verify compliance with the specification, and documentation
that helps developers through the process.
Today, the REUSE Project announced the release of specification version 3.3 and
tool version 5.0.0. These releases follow closely on the heels of
the 3.2 release this past
summer, which introduced the 'REUSE.toml', a
configuration file which allows easy and precise licensing annotations
of other files in a project.
In this new 3.3 update, the specification builds on version 3.2 by
incorporating additional
refinements, some of those small tweaks proposed by the community.
The new release of the tool comes with bug
fixes, performance improvements, and the ability to lint individual
files instead of the entire project.
How does REUSE work?
The core idea behind REUSE is really simple. First, choose and provide
your licences. Second, add copyright and licensing information to each
file. And finally, confirm REUSE compliance using the tool. REUSE makes
adding copyright and licensing information as simple as possible, using
industry-standard System Package Data Exchange
(SPDX) tags that are easily parsed by many tools.
Each file needs just two tags, one for copyright and one for licensing.
By making licensing so comprehensive, the reuse of code becomes a lot
simpler, hence the project’s name. If a third party finds some
REUSE-compliant code that they like, they can easily find the copyright
and licensing, and they can in practice just copy the file to their own
project without losing any information. In the past, re-users of code
would have often had to guess a file’s licensing from incomplete or
ambiguous information. But with REUSE, this process becomes trivial, and
the developer’s Free Software is much more easily propagated.
A community standard
REUSE is steadily being adopted by more and more projects. In 2020, KDE became one of the biggest Free Software
communities to adopt REUSE as their licensing policy, after the Linux
kernel in 2017. Other big adopters since then are Weblate, the Rust programming language, Nextcloud, curl, the Khronos Group, the German Aerospace
Center, and many others. Software Heritage has begun
recommending REUSE as a way to prepare projects for archival.
“An approach such as REUSE makes it much easier to follow an established
good practice… I do not have to think where to put a specific
information such as the license files as REUSE gives me clear advice. In
addition, REUSE helps me to check whether I accidentally missed
something. Such tools are really, really important because they bring a
standard into practice.” Tobias Schlauch, German Aerospace
Center
Under the current system of copyright, software is non-free by default.
As such, licensing is the backbone that enables software to be free.
REUSE helps the Free Software community do this as clearly and as simply
as possible.
Adopting REUSE is fortunately easier than ever. The tutorial walks developers
through the three steps, and the FAQ answers all questions about
copyright, about licensing, and about REUSE. If you need more
motivations for adopting REUSE, this FAQ entry goes into
more depth.
The REUSE project thrives thanks to the community and all those who
support and adopt it! Contributions from our FSFE supporters enable us
to continue developing REUSE and drive forward our other important
initiatives. By becoming an FSFE supporter, you join a network of
individuals who ensure our long-term impact. You can also help by asking
your company to join the REUSE
sponsors.
Your support makes our
work possible!
Support FSFE
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