fsfe-reuse 0.4.0a1

Background

Copyright and licensing is difficult, especially when reusing software from different projects that are released under various different licenses. The REUSE Initiative was started by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to provide a set of recommendations to make licensing your free software projects easier. Not only do these recommendations make it easier for you to declare the licenses under which your works are released, but they also make it easier for a computer to understand how your project is licensed.

As a short summary, the recommendations are threefold:

1. Choose and provide licenses

2. Add copyright and license information to each file

3. Confirm REUSE compliance

You are recommended to read the recommendations in full for more details. (IMPORTANT: These recommendations are currently out-of-date! See <https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-docs>.)

This tool exists to facilitate the developer in complying to the above recommendations.

There are other tools, such as FOSSology, that have a lot more features and functionality surrounding the analysis and inspection of copyright and licenses in software projects. reuse, on the other hand, is solely designed to be a simple tool to assist in compliance with the REUSE Initiative recommendations.

Install

To install reuse, you need to have the following pieces of software on your computer:

• Python 3.6+

• Pip

To install reuse, you only need to run the following command:

pip3 install --user fsfe-reuse

After this, make sure that ~/.local/bin is in your $PATH.

Usage

First, read the REUSE recommendations. In a nutshell:

• Include the texts of all used licenses in your project.

• Add a comment header to each file that says SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later.

• Add a comment header to each file that says SPDX-Copyright: $YEAR $NAME. You can be flexible with the format, just make sure that the line starts with SPDX-Copyright:.

Once you have taken those steps (again, read the actual recommendations for better instructions), you can use this tool to verify whether your project is fully compliant with the REUSE recommendations. To check against the recommendations, use reuse lint:

~/Projects/reuse-tool $ reuse lint
[...]
Congratulations! Your project is REUSE compliant :-)

Maintainers

• Carmen Bianca Bakker - carmenbianca@fsfe.org

Contribute

Any pull requests or suggestions are welcome at <https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool> or via e-mail to one of the maintainers. General inquiries can be sent to contact@fsfe.org.

Starting local development is very simple, just execute the following commands:

git clone git@github.com:fsfe/reuse-tool.git
cd reuse-tool/
python3 -mvenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
make develop

You need to run make develop at least once to set up the virtualenv.

Next, run make help to see the available interactions.

License

Copyright (C) 2017-2019 Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.

Licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later.

0.4.0a1 - 2019-06-04

This release is a major overhaul and refactoring of the tool. Its primary focus is improved usability and speed, as well as adhering to a new version of the spec that is currently in the works.

Please note that this release is incomplete, may contain bugs, and its documentation is lacking and/or simply wrong. It is provided as an early preview.

0.3.4 - 2019-04-15

This release should be a short-lived one. A new (slightly backwards-incompatible) version is in the works.

0.3.3 - 2018-07-15

Fixed

• Any files with the suffix .spdx are no longer considered licenses.

0.3.2 - 2018-07-15

Fixed

• The documentation now builds under Python 3.7.

0.3.1 - 2018-07-14

Fixed

• When using reuse from a child directory using pygit2, correctly find the root.

0.3.0 - 2018-05-16

0.2.0 - 2018-04-17

0.1.1 - 2017-12-14

0.1.0 - 2017-12-14

0.0.4 - 2017-11-06

Fixed

• Removed dependency on os.PathLike so that Python 3.5 is actually supported

0.0.3 - 2017-11-06

Fixed

• Fixed the link to PyPI in the README.

0.0.2 - 2017-11-03

This is a very early development release aimed at distributing the program as soon as possible. Because this is the first release, the changelog is a little empty beyond “created the program”.

The program can do roughly the following:

• Detect the license of a given file through one of three methods (in order of precedence):

  • Information embedded in the .license file.

  • Information embedded in its header.

  • Information from the global debian/copyright file.

• Find and report all files in a project tree of which the license could not be found.

• Ignore files ignored by Git.

• Do some logging into STDERR.