Add option to pay attention to files named COPYING or LICENSE

[Jayman2000]

The REUSE Tool ignores files whose names start with LICENSE or COPYING. I tried creating a repo like this one that contains a COPYING.md file that just says that the repo is REUSE compliant. When I run reuse lint, it tells me that CC0-1.0 is unused despite the fact that COPYING.md contains SPDX-License-Identifier: CC0-1.0:

$ cd reuse-ignores-copying
$ cat COPYING.md
<!--
SPDX-License-Identifier: CC0-1.0
SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2023 Jason Yundt <jason@jasonyundt.email>
-->

# Copying Information

This repo is [REUSE](https://reuse.software) compliant.
$ reuse lint
# UNUSED LICENSES

The following licenses are not used:
* CC0-1.0



# SUMMARY

* Bad licenses: 0
* Deprecated licenses: 0
* Licenses without file extension: 0
* Missing licenses: 0
* Unused licenses: CC0-1.0
* Used licenses: 0
* Read errors: 0
* files with copyright information: 0 / 0
* files with license information: 0 / 0

Unfortunately, your project is not compliant with version 3.0 of the REUSE Specification :-(
$ 

---

As far as I know, this is intentional. According to this comment from @mxmehl,

Ah, I didn't see the LICENSE.md file. Indeed, it's not checked by the tool because it's considered to contain a license text (which per definition is excluded from the obligation to contain copyright and licensing info).

Max is right. The spec says

• Covered File --- any file in a Project, except for
  • The License Files.
  • […]

and

Each Covered File MUST have Copyright and Licensing Information associated with
it.

If you had a file in your project named COPYING or LICENSE, and that file contained the text of a license, then it would be OK to ignore the contents of that file. After all, the file doesn’t need to have an SPDX-License-Identifier or an SPDX-FileCopyrightText tag because it’s a License File. That being said, reuse lint should still report an error in this case because there should never be a file named COPYING or LICENSE that contains the text of a license. All files that contain the text of licenses need to be in the LICENSES/ directory, and they need to be named something other than COPYING or LICENSE. The spec says:

Each License File MUST be placed in the LICENSES/ directory in the root of
the Project. The name of the License File MUST be the SPDX License Identifier of the
license followed by an appropriate file extension (example:
LICENSES/GPL-3.0-or-later.txt).

---

Personally, I want an option to make the REUSE Tool not ignore files named COPYING or LICENSE. Another possibility would be to just make the REUSE Tool just never ignore those files.

If we want to keep assuming that those files contain license text, then we could make reuse lint give an error whenever it detects a file named COPYING or LICENSE. I’m personally not in favor of this possibility, but it would be better that what we have at the moment.

[mxmehl]

Thanks for the elaborate suggestion. However, I am afraid we live in two different worlds ;)

In your world, software forges such as GitHub and naive license scanners respect the REUSE standard and its LICENSES directory. In my world, however, they don't. This is why the REUSE spec and the tool still assume that projects have a LICENSE or COPYING file so that they "main license" (whatever that is) is displayed and detected.

I hope my world will become more like your world very soon which is when we can revisit this proposal. Until then, I am afraid my recommendation for REUSE will be to continue its practice as before to not break valid expectations and force developers into choosing between the REUSE best practices and the other practices and recommendations.

[Jayman2000]

This is why the REUSE spec and the tool still assume that projects have a LICENSE or COPYING file so that they "main license" (whatever that is) is displayed and detected.

I didn’t know that the REUSE Spec assumed that projects have a LICENSE or COPYING file. Where does the spec assume that projects have a LICENSE or COPYING file?

I hope my world will become more like your world very soon which is when we can revisit this proposal. Until then, I am afraid my recommendation for REUSE will be to continue its practice as before to not break valid expectations[…]

Well, if we’re concerned about not breaking valid expectations, then there’s another change that I think should be made. When the tool ignored my COPYING.md file, it would have been nice if it had told me. I really wasn’t expecting the tool to do that, and it was kind of frustrating.

[…]and force developers into choosing between the REUSE best practices and the other practices and recommendations.

I’m confused. Like I mentioned before, “Personally, I want an option to make the REUSE Tool not ignore files named COPYING or LICENSE.” How would adding a --dont-ignore-copying-or-license option force developers into choosing between the REUSE best practices and the other practices and recommendations?

[carmenbianca]

The spec should probably mention that COPYING and LICENSE files are ignored completely by the tool, unless we want to undo that functionality. I'll create an issue for it in fsfe/reuse-docs. The reason these files are ignored is to allow people to stick to some old traditions while also adopting REUSE on top of them. And because the REUSE spec is not itself compatible with the putting licence texts in COPYING or LICENSE (and will never be compatible with that), we just ignore their contents to allow the two systems to live side-by-side.

COPYING.md and LICENSE.md (with the extensions) are not special files in any case.

[carmenbianca]

Closed in #886, kind of. In the end the specification and the tool were changed to say COPYING[.ext] and LICENSE[.ext] are ignored.