Thank you Stephan for bringing REUSE into the discussion and Cc'ing me (I am not part of this list). Please let me just add two small things to your otherwise encompassing mail.
~ Stephan Lachnit [2022-01-26 12:49 +0100]: > - What is REUSE? If you have ~15min of time and rather fancy video intros than text, this recording of a recent talk could be for you [^1]. Otherwise, please check out the official website [^2] that also offers a tutorial that should get you up to speed. > Note that I don't want DEP-5 to go away - it is unlikely that every > project will follow the REUSE spec and writing an SPDX document by > hand has no significant advantages over DEP-5. Besides, using the > file-exclusion function in DEP-5 for uscan is quite useful for ds/dfsg > packages (although that could also be moved to an external file). FWIW, as you may have already noticed, REUSE makes use of DEP-5 as well, as one (and honestly the least preferred) of the three ways how you can label your files. We have a better file-based format in the works [^3], and would probably also provide a converter from DEP-5 to this new REUSE.yaml format. That would mean that the REUSE helper tool in the future could take DEP-5 files, convert them to the modern format, and run a lint to check whether everything is fine – and if you want, also generate a SBOM. But already now, a DEP-5 file could be provided to REUSE. One would have to check whether the ones Debian provides would work in the default location for DEP-5 files in REUSE (`.reuse/dep5`). If not, I suspect there would be no large changes needed. With this, I just would like to emphasise that Debian's extra care about proper licensing is a great plus and comes in handy if you were to streamline and extend it by widely supported best practices like REUSE. As Stephan said, I'd be thrilled to work together with you to make licensing and copyright in Debian and ideally also upstream easier and more understandable for users and developers. Best, Max [^1]: https://www.sfscon.it/talks/reuse/ [^2]: https://reuse.software/ [^3]: https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-docs/issues/81 -- Max Mehl - Programme Manager - Free Software Foundation Europe Contact and information: https://fsfe.org/about/mehl | @mxmehl Become a supporter of software freedom: https://fsfe.org/join