REUSE compliance

[brownbaerchen]

Due Diligence

• General:
  • title of the PR is suitable to appear in the Release Notes

Description

We have promised in the HeatHub project to achieve and enforce REUSE compliance. This is about licensing. We need to specify a license and integrate the reuse linting tool to check the licensing.

Now, we already have a LICENSE file, which specifies MIT license globally and we don't want to change that at this time. However, this is apparently not machine readable. In order to make the machine accept our global license, we need to move the license to LICENSES/MIT.txt and specify that this should apply globally in REUSE.toml. Annoyingly, we cannot merge that with pyproject.toml at this time.

This is a draft PR because there a few open questions:

• Who is the copyright holder? We just specify what is already in the preexisting MIT license
• Do we really want this all-encompassing license or do some individual images or whatever require their own licenses? For instance, the datasets probably need their original datasets specified, right? In the past, we didn't worry about it, yes? Do we want to worry about it now? Yes, add individual licenses
  • added licenses for datasets
  • add licenses for various images in the docs?
• We may want to merge Cx Organization #1884 first and then move this workflow to the actions directory and implement a trigger in some workflow. Probably the push to main one, since there is really no way to mess this up with the global configuration..
• Do we want a badge in the readme? yes, we love a badge

Changes proposed:

• Implement reuse linting GitHub workflow
• Make global license machine readable

Type of change

Delivering deliverables

Does this change modify the behaviour of other functions? If so, which?

no

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR introduces REUSE compliance infrastructure for the Heat repository by adding a REUSE configuration, moving the MIT license text into the REUSE-expected LICENSES/ layout, and wiring up CI to lint licensing metadata.

Changes:

• Add REUSE.toml with global MIT licensing annotations and per-dataset overrides.
• Add LICENSES/MIT.txt and update the README to reference the new license location and include a REUSE status badge.
• Add a GitHub Actions workflow to run reuse lint in CI.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 3 out of 4 changed files in this pull request and generated 5 comments.

File	Description
REUSE.toml	Defines global SPDX annotations and dataset-specific license overrides for REUSE linting.
README.md	Adds a REUSE badge and updates the license link to the new LICENSES/MIT.txt path.
LICENSES/MIT.txt	Provides the MIT license text in the machine-readable location expected by REUSE.
.github/workflows/reuse_compliance.yml	Adds CI automation to run reuse lint.

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