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.
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.