Suggestion: Global default .license file

[lofidevops]

Problem statement:

I've encountered some resistance to per-file notices. And I'd like to generally ease adoption :)

Suggested solution:

Declare a file called .license at the root of the project/repo. If any file is missing a copyright declaration, assume that .license applies. (It is the responsibility of the maintainer to make sure this holds true.)

[carmenbianca]

I've encountered some resistance to per-file notices.

This is recurring, but the per-file notices are also the entire foundation of REUSE. They're the idea upon which REUSE is founded.

If you're doing REUSE by putting a glob on the entire project that says 'Copyright: The Project Contributors; SPDX-License-Identifier: My-License' (which you can already do in .reuse/dep5), then you're doing REUSE wrong. You're just satisfying the linter instead of putting in the work of getting copyright and licensing right, when the entire point of the linter is to help you get copyright and licensing right.

Closing WONTFIX. #534 and #68 combined would somewhat address this issue by automagically populating every file with headers on every commit, using default values.

[lofidevops]

@carmenbianca Thanks for the clarification! The tickets you pointed to are helpful. Perhaps the lesson I should take away is not suggesting reuse to someone who doesn't like per-file notices 😭

[seabass-labrax]

I sympathise, @lofidevops - there are still those who are yet to be convinced, but bravo for giving it a go 🙂