2025-10-11 In praise of REUSE for Free Software licensing

Published on 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 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, a fork of Dire Wolf, a popular piece of software for 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, GnuWin and more.

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