Support the REUSE spec for license information

[jendrikw]

Select Topic Area

Question

Body

The Free Software Foundation Europe created a fairly nice specification called REUSE.

Copyright and licensing is difficult, especially when reusing software from different projects that are released under various different licenses. REUSE was started by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to provide a set of recommendations to make licensing your Free Software projects easier. Not only do these recommendations make it easier for you to declare the licenses under which your works are released, but they also make it easier for a computer to understand how your project is licensed.

It is becoming somewhat common in projects, one example being cURL which is hosted here on GitHub. cURL seems to work around GitHub's lack of support through just mirroring the license information in the root of the repository. https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/master/COPYING

I think the answer to my question is no, but I am wondering if it is on GitHub's roadmap. At least one other forge software supports REUSE (SourceHut).

[JaimeMrF]

At the moment, GitHub does not have native support for the REUSE specification from FSFE. Licensing detection on GitHub primarily relies on the presence of standard license files (e.g., LICENSE or COPYING) and the licensee
library, which can identify many common open source licenses.

There’s no public information indicating that REUSE support is on GitHub’s roadmap. If you’d like to see it implemented, the best path is to open a feature request through GitHub Feedback
so that the product team can review community interest.

For now, projects that want to follow REUSE can still include the recommended files and headers in their repositories, but GitHub will not interpret them beyond the usual license detection.

[jendrikw]

Thanks, I opened a discussion in the "product feedback" category: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/173309