When publishing open source software, not every file necessarily needs to be (or can be) under the same license and same copyright.

• Code usually needs a different license than Documentation
• Some parts of code (Tests) may need different licenses than others
• Source files copied from other projects need to retain their licensing information
• ...

The REUSE Standard was established by the Free Software Foundation Europe to make it easier to license Open Source Software.

Specifically, it allows to specify the license information for each file, and provides tooling to make that as frictionless as possible.

The REUSE Template allows to quickly kickstart a project and make it ready for publishing as open source.

The template was created for Deutsche Telekom Projects, but is agnostic enough to be used by anyone.