[Reuse] REUSE tutorial

[Max Mehl]

Hi Carmen,

~ Carmen Bianca Bakker [2019-04-25 08:03 +0200]:
> Some quick thoughts for the mailing list:

Thanks. Will you channel back our finding to Luis?

>> > Couple of observations on Reuse; feel free to share (or point me to a better discussion forum):
>> > As we already discussed, "why" would be good. Eventually, to be transparent, I think one reason "why" could be "Tidelift's customers will pay you, through Tidelift, to do it".
> 
> Rationales need to be visible on the websites. I think the tutorial
> should be as short as possible, though. But perhaps one short, quippy
> line?

Yes, I think as soon as we found a catchy slogan and elevator pitch, we
can paste it on both landing page and tutorial.

>> > It'd be good if the documentation mentioned what tools actually pick up Reuse metadata. eg, my understanding is that Valid-License-Identifier is a Reuse-specific extension and so may not get picked up by all scanners? If it is picked up by many major scanners, it'd be good to say that!
> 
> Good idea. Maybe upstream Valid-License-Identifier to SPDX?

Not sure if that works, but I could ask Kate in a phone call we are
going to have in 1-2 weeks.

So Valid-License-Identifier is for identifying customised licenses like
MIT and BSD, and when the same license appears with multiple, different
copyright holders, right? Is there any other argument how we can
convince SPDX to include this?

>> > Should it have a concept similar to ClearlyDefined's facets? I think it'd be useful to be able to not just say "this file is CC-BY", but "this file is CC-BY and a documentation file", or rather than "this file is proprietary" instead "this file is proprietary and a test file". Both of these are common situations that metadata would help scanners to analyze and deal with, and that upstream maintainers are best positioned to analyze.
> 
> Basically a good idea, but would mess with the simplicity of REUSE.
> Maybe like an optional config file such as the DEP5 file, that can mark
> entire directories? But I think this is outside of the scope of REUSE.

Full ack. I also think would be harder to sell to our target audience,
and would increase manual work for them.

>> > Have you given any thought to how this meshes with SFLC's recommendations? Specifically, they recommend centralizing copyright notices, and that seems like something that might be worth incorporating somehow.
> 
> I think REUSE is doing the exact opposite, short of including the
> license texts in a centralised location (LICENSES/). I'm not certain if
> the approaches are inherently incompatible, or whether something can be
> done here.

I think so too. Especially since one can easily create a BoM with full
REUSE compliance, so generation of a central file would be easy.

Best,
Max 

-- 
Max Mehl - Programme Manager - Free Software Foundation Europe
Contact and information: https://fsfe.org/about/mehl | @mxmehl
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