Open Source Leadership Summit 2018

The REUSE principles is a set of best practices for markup of licenses and source file headers which make it possible and easy to automate license detection. Building on the successful work of the SPDX working group, the REUSE principles make use of the same standard, but adds to it. Work on making the Linux kernel compatible with the REUSE principles is ongoing, but the standard applies generally and can be used by any software project to facilitate downstream compliance.

Coupled with the REUSE principles come a set of basic tools to "lint check" a source repository to validate if it's REUSE compliant, and tools to automatically generate an SPDX compatible bill-of-materials.In this talk, Jonas Öberg will give an introduction to the REUSE principles and outline some of the work in progress as the initiative moves from licenses to copyright, and lays the foundation for other tools seeking to automate the compliance process.