REUSE compatibility

[n0toose]

REUSE (reuse.software) is a standard by the Free Software Foundation Europe that is a superset of the SPDX-styled copyright headers that you see in the Linux kernel.

They make reusing source code across separate projects (or entirely different projects) much easier, as you can just copy and paste segments across different projects (or an entirely different project, with different "copyright owners" or even different, but compatible licensing models) without caring too much about the whole compliance part.

In short, the following changes would have to be theoretically made, given that there's interest:

• Add a copyright header to every source file
• Move the license file to LICENSES/ (as projects, such as this one, can have more than one license or consist of components that have more than one license)
• Create a .reuse folder declaring the license information for e.g. binary files, where adding a text header is not possible or practical
• Optional: Add reuse-action to the CI.

I estimate that this would take approximately 90 minutes, give or take.

[jounathaen]

I discussed this with @mkroening, and we decided not to use copyright headers.
So probably the only action necessary here are:

• Fix the license files (current one has copyright year XXXX).
• Potentially move the license files as you suggested.

[mkroening]

• Potentially move the license files as you suggested.

I don't think we should move the license files. There is no precedent in the Rust community that I am aware of, but to the best of my knowledge, having LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT is the commonly expected package layout.

[n0toose]

There is no precedent in the Rust community that I am aware of

Totally agree that this should not be done on its own, as this would be a "partial implementation" of a greater set of standards that is not otherwise seen anywhere, whereas LICENSE-MIT, etc. was a "de facto" standard before REUSE and still existent among open source projects today.

REUSE includes moving the licenses to a LICENSES/ folder with the corresponding SPDX headers as the file name (Example), among other rules.

I'll just work on something less bureaucratic instead. =)