[NGI0-FSFE] REUSE: best practices for copyright and licensing information

[Jit-p]

Hello! I am Jithendra from the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). We are helping software projects within the Next Generation Internet Zero Initiative (https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-zero/) with their licensing and copyright management. After a quick check on some repositories of EEZ studio, I would like to propose some updates regarding copyright and licensing information, using our REUSE framework.

REUSE: best practices for copyright and licensing information

REUSE (https://reuse.software/) is an FSFE developed initiative intended to make licensing easier by establishing a single way to display all copyright and licensing information through comment headers on source files that can be human- and machine-readable. This in turn helps with maintaining clear communication of copyright and licensing information to avoid legal issues downstream.

The REUSE tool makes the process of applying licenses to files and compliance checking much easier. Instructions on how to install the REUSE tool can be found here:

https://reuse.readthedocs.io/en/stable/readme.html#install

You can also check out this screencast for more instructions on how to use the REUSE tool:

https://download.fsfe.org/videos/reuse/screencasts/reuse-tool.gif

Example of implementing REUSE in EEZ studio

I forked a repository and applied the best practices, so you can evaluate it directly in the source code files. In case you decide to adopt REUSE we are happy to help.

Files with missing copyright and licensing information

To serve as an example, I added the SPDX headers with copyright and license information to the copyrightable files in your included directory. This should give you an idea of how comment headers should look like in a REUSE compliant repository (where all files would have such headers to communicate license and copyright information). All the modified files are in the NGI0-REUSE branch.

Please double check if the information about the copyrightholder is correct.

LICENSES Directory in the Root of the Project

I moved to this directory the files that contained the GPL and MIT license texts.

Please let us know if REUSE is helpful and makes sense for your project. Happy to help in this process and apply REUSE to the entire repository.

Best, Jithendra