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<html newsdate="2017-12-19">
<title>FSFE releases refreshed set of REUSE practices and a tool to help developers comply</title>
<h1>FSFE releases refreshed set of REUSE practices and a tool to help developers comply</h1>
The REUSE Initiative has received an updated set of practices that simplify
the process of declaring copyright and licence information. To help
facilitate developers with updating their projects, the FSFE has also
published a tool that verifies whether a project is compliant.
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Copyright and licensing is difficult. Finding out the exact copyright and
licence of a piece of code is often times more difficult than it should be.
Missing or scattered licence information makes it very labour-intensive to
verify whether you can legally use a piece of code. For a thorough legal
review, you have to manually check every file for licence information, and
every file has a different way of declaring its copyright and licence.
But what if we could automate this? That is what
the <a href="">REUSE Initiative</a> postulates. By
defining a standard for copyright and licence declaration, the legal process
of complying with licences becomes a lot easier. Simply include a standard,
computer-readable header tag to every file, and extracting the licence
information should be as simple as running a parser.
Earlier in October, we released a set of practices towards that end. Now,
we have <a href="">updated those
practices</a> to streamline them some. To accompany the streamlined
changes, we have published
<a href="">a tool</a> for developers to
check whether they comply with our recommendations.
The primary change between the old version and the new is that you no longer
need to declare two tags; only one. 'License-Filename' has been deprecated,
and instead its functionality has been rolled into
'SPDX-License-Identifier'. This is more in line with existing projects, and
is less effort to boot.
Complying with the REUSE recommendations is very simple. Why not give it a
spin? We would love to hear from you.
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<author id="carmenbianca" />