2025-10-11 In praise of REUSE for Free Software licensing
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.. feed-entry::
   :date: 2025-10-11

Software licensing can be tricky, legally, but also logistically.

If you can get away with just a ``LICENSE`` file in your project root, excellent.
Unfortunately often things are more complex.

`REUSE <https://reuse.software/>`__ is a set of recommendations and tools that really helps.

The documentation is excellent, but in short:

* Automatically annotate your files with copyright and licence data with ``reuse annotate``
* Fetch licence texts with ``reuse download``
* Check your compliance with ``reuse lint``
* Bulk configure files with ``REUSE.toml``

A current side-project of mine is `Samoyed <https://github.com/doismellburning/samoyed>`__,
a fork of `Dire Wolf <https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf>`__,
a popular piece of software for `packet radio <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio>`__.

As a fork, I already wanted to make very sure I was doing absolutely the right things with regard to licensing and notices etc.,
but it was made even more complex by Dire Wolf vendoring code from `the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency <https://www.nga.mil/>`__,
`GnuWin <https://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/>`__ and more.

REUSE made it nice and straightforward: https://github.com/doismellburning/samoyed/pull/139.