[REUSE] Addressing some papercuts in the specification

[Matija Šuklje]

Die 24. 12. 21 et hora 12:06 Haelwenn (lanodan) Monnier scripsit:
> For example one kind of format I would definitely add in such a tool is:

Just out of curiosity what does your tool catch that existing tools such as 
ScanCode and FOSSology do not?

See e.g. research paper:
 https://oss.cs.fau.de/2019/08/07/final-thesis-a-comparison-study-of-open-source-license-crawler/

> # Copyright 1999-2021 Gentoo Authors
> # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2
>  
> And of course this one doesn't uses SPDX and has the slightly annoying
> problem of not being explicit on being "GPL-2.0-only" or "GPL-2-or-later".

This can be a big problem. 

There is a good reason why for the licensing information REUSE strictly 
requires the SPDX tag, while for the copyright statement it does not.

Also while cleaning up the Linux kernel and moving it to use SPDX tags, if 
memory serves me right they identified hundred(s) of ways GPL is referred to

If we’re just talking about license texts of GPL-2.0, there are 20+ already 
identified versions:
https://github.com/pombredanne/gpl-history

And this is why REUSE, and many others, so happily relies on the SPDX IDs for 
license UIDs and the SPDX License List for a list of canonical license texts. 
Since SPDX has become an ISO standard, I would suspect its use will grow not 
dwindle.

(Sure, the syntax inconsistency caused by hyphen in the legacy SPDX-License-
Identifier tag is annoying, just as the “-only” and “-or-later” suffixes for 
the GPL family of licenses are, but that’s a minor gripe compared to what it 
fixes. And above all, that is a discussion to take at the SPDX level, not 
REUSE.)

When it comes to copyright statements, while copyright law typically 
proscribes how they should look like, in practice since copyright is 
automatic, the statements are more akin proof or rather clues.

For example, if we were strict, a copyright statement that is in line with 
both the US and Slovenian (as the EU jurisdiction I am most familiar with), 
would look like this:

© 2021 Matija Šuklje

…anything more is not required by law, anything less makes it non-compliant

But since some licenses (and copyright law) require you _keep_ the copyright 
notices as they are, REUSE is much more flexible on how the statements should 
look like, but that they should be there.

more:
https://matija.suklje.name/how-and-why-to-properly-write-copyright-statements-in-your-code#introduction-and-copyright-basics
https://matija.suklje.name/how-and-why-to-properly-write-copyright-statements-in-your-code#why-have-the-copyright-statement

> By the way I would be interested in helping to create such a specification
> with reasonable coverage that I think could be verified thanks to the work
> already done within distributions.

By discussing here on this mailing list and  its GitHub issue tracker 
<https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-docs/> (yes, I know, GH…) you help creating 
such a spec :)


holiday cheers,
Matija
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