REUSE: Indicating licence and copyright information - Lina Ceballos FrOSCon 2022
Channel: Free Software Foundation Europe
Date: 2022-08-31

Developing, using, and re-using Free Software is fun, but dealing with licensing and copyright information is not. REUSE changes that. With three simple steps, it makes adding and reading licensing and copyright information easy for both humans and machines. In this presentation, Lina Ceballos will guide us through the REUSE principles and will show us how to make licensing clear and simple.

If you want to grant users the freedoms to use, study, share and improve your software, you have to grant those freedoms in the software licence. To encourage people to develop Free Software, we help developers to understand and apply Free Software licences. Since 2017, REUSE contributes to this goal. Any project that follows the initiative's recommendations makes copyright and licensing information readable for both humans and machines. In this way, we want to ensure that individuals, organisations and companies that are reusing code are aware of the licence terms chosen by the original author.

REUSE does not "reinvent the wheel". On the contrary, it integrates seamlessly into development processes and other best practices when indicating Free Software licences. In addition, there are tools and documentation to help you get started. During this talk we will take a closer look at these tools and documentation, with the bonus of seeing a live demonstration of how to make a project compliant with the REUSE specifications.