GNU Health opts for REUSE
In the framework of the REUSE Booster initiative, the FSFE provides individual assessments and direct assistance to Free Software projects in the implementation of the REUSE best practices. GNU Health, a project that combines social medicine with technology, has recently become REUSE compliant. We have talked with Dr. Luis Falcón, its founder.
Boosting REUSE
Understanding and complying with legal obligations can be a burden sometimes, especially when reusing software from different projects that are released under different licenses. The REUSE initiative, introduced by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), aims to make the communication of licensing and copyright information of Free Software projects easier for everyone. With a set of best practices and the helper tool, adding this legal information in every single file of the project becomes a simple process.
Last year, the FSFE launched REUSE Booster, an initiative that aims to directly assist and support projects in the process of implementing REUSE. As a result of those efforts, the Free Software project GNU Health has recently adopted the REUSE specification 3.0 in its components: Hospital Management System (both server and client) and Thalamus (the message server for the GH Federation).
GNU Health and its REUSE adoption
GNU Health is a community driven Free Software project from GNU Solidario; a non-profit humanitarian organisation that focuses both on technology and on social medicine. The software has been adopted by different organisations and national public health systems around the globe. From now on, users and re-users of GNU Health will have a clear overview of the copyright notices and license terms thanks to the standardised way of displaying it by following the REUSE specification.
“The task of manually keeping track, displaying and writing the legal information in large Free/Libre projects like GNU Health can be daunting. The REUSE project makes this tedious process simple. I invite the Libre software community to adopt REUSE as the standard for displaying legal information to boost development, productivity and integration among projects.”
Dr. Luis Falcón, founder of GNU Solidario and author of GNU Health.
In this short video interview, Dr. Luis Falcón shares with us how the process of adopting REUSE was for the GNU Health team, while also encourages other Free Software projects to join them in displaying their licensing and copyright information in an unambiguous and perfectly human- and machine-readable way.
REUSE adopters
At the moment the REUSE API has 1300+ projects registered as REUSE compliant. Within those we can highlight, among others, projects such as curl, and cosmoscout-vr from the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The Linux Kernel has also partially adopted REUSE, and the well-known KDE community, included REUSE in their licensing policy and they already migrated all their frameworks to the recommended standard.
We welcome other developers to adopt REUSE and look forward to feedback and collaboration. If you want to contact us, you need an extra hand in implementing REUSE in your project, or you just want to participate in the discussion, we invite you to join the mailing list.
Thanks to all our volunteers, contributors, and supporters!
This is therefore a great opportunity to thank our volunteers and external contributors to REUSE for their great work in continuing improving the tool and documentation but also for keeping up an ongoing and fruitful discussion regarding its specification.
The contribution of all our supporters also allows our continuing work on REUSE as well as on all our activities. You can join them by becoming a supporter, tell your friends how they can support our work with a small donation, or even ask your family to support the FSFE and our campaigns as a meaningful holiday gift.