REUSE Software: Making Copyright and Licensing Compliance Easier for Everyone

Abstract

Best practices for displaying data and metadata pertaining to software licensing and copyright are currently unharmonized. The multiple competing licensing requirements for communicating the chosen license of a software project and its copyright holders increase the compliance burden on project maintainers, especially for smaller free and open source (FOSS) ones. The "REUSE Software" initiative aims to remediate this situation by defining a set of easy-to-implement best practices for declaring copyright and licensing in an unambiguous, human- and machine-readable way, so that the information is preserved when the file is copied and reused by third parties. REUSE specifications facilitate management policies for digital commons, improving data and metadata communication for individuals, communities, governments, and businesses.