Dear all,
We are happy to announce the first draft of the REUSE 3.0 specification! REUSE 3.0 contains exciting improvements. We have solved a lot of issues and edge cases, reduced complexity for developers, and increased compatibility with other license compliance projects. We have also worked on a tutorial and FAQ to make adoption of REUSE even easier.
Because of the new specification's extend and our aspiration to make REUSE compatible to as many other license compliance efforts, we kindly invite you to provide feedback. Please share your feedback via the REUSE mailing list or directly create a Git issue *before 28 July 23:59 CEST*.
- Specification, tutorial, and FAQ draft for REUSE 3.0: https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-docs/tree/v3.0a1
- Changelog of specification and corresponding documents: https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-docs/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
- Mailing list: https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/reuse
- Git issue tracker: https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-docs/issues
In addition to the linked changelog, you might be interested in the rationales behind some decisions we have made:
- SPDX-Copyright: "SPDX-Copyright" is visually consistent with "SPDX-License-Identifier", which communicates to the reader that the two items belong together. As a slight added benefit, "SPDX-Copyright" is easier to parse.
- LICENSES/ directory: Having a license file in the root of the project is handy, but we believe it is more valuable to have all licenses in one place, so that there can be no confusion about the licenses used by a project. We are aware that this breaks the license detection/display in GitHub and other software forges, but we see no other way how to properly deal with multi-license projects. We will reach out to these parties in order to find a good solution.
- Recommendation on copyright format: This provides a simple recommendation that should be good for most people. We do not mandate anything other than that the copyright notice contain the name of the copyright holder
- Removed mention of VCS to track copyright: These recommendations were far too abstract, so they were simply scrapped.
- Removed mention of bill of materials: This is out-of-scope for the spec. However, the REUSE helper tool still supports the generation of such a document.
We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts before *28 July 23:59 CEST* so we can start incorporating them in the finalisation of the specification soon. Thank you!
Best, Max
P.S.: You might also be interested in the REUSE helper tool [^1] and its Docker image in your CI processes [^2].
[^1]: https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool
[^2]: https://hub.docker.com/r/fsfe/reuse