Does the author permit re-licensing the cmake code for extracting package name and version from package.xml?

[Levi-Armstrong]

I would like to us the following cmake code for my project but would like use my projects licenses and avoid adding BSD-3. I believe in order to use the Apache 2 license I need permission of the author to do so.

  # Read the package manifest.
  file(READ "${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/package.xml" package_xml_str)

  # Extract project name.
  if(NOT package_xml_str MATCHES "<name>([A-Za-z0-9_]+)</name>")
    message(FATAL_ERROR "Could not parse project name from package manifest (aborting)")
  else()
    set(${prefix}_extracted_name ${CMAKE_MATCH_1})
  endif()

  # Extract project version.
  if(NOT package_xml_str MATCHES "<version>([0-9]+.[0-9]+.[0-9]+)</version>")
    message(FATAL_ERROR "Could not parse project version from package manifest (aborting)")
  else()
    set(${prefix}_extracted_version ${CMAKE_MATCH_1})
  endif()

[gavanderhoorn]

Out of curiosity: both Apache v2 and BSD are pretty liberal, and are actually compatible with one another (IANAL and IIRC). Would it be a problem to add a notice stating that particular snippet came from another project and is licensed under a different (but compatible) license?

---

Edit: and to be precise: that snippet eventually comes from abb_libegm (here), which was merged in in ros-industrial/abb_libegm#63, which took it from ros-industrial/abb_libegm#63 (comment).

[Levi-Armstrong]

Out of curiosity: both Apache v2 and BSD are pretty liberal, and are actually compatible with one another (IANAL and IIRC). Would it be a problem to add a notice stating that particular snippet came from another project and is licensed under a different (but compatible) license?

I don't think so for the my case (Apache v2) but not sure if it would be an issue for other packages with different licenses. I just think this piece of code is very useful and could be used by all ROS packages.

[gavanderhoorn]

Again, IANAL, but if you're include(..)-ing something from another package, that would not necessarily seem to immediately affect what license your own package is under. Compare with GPL-ed packages providing you with a *Config.cmake. find_package(..)-ing those packages does not make your own package GPL.

I can't really find any CMake-specific examples wrt licensing, but it's not a compiled and/or linked language system, so I would expect things to be different from those.

[Levi-Armstrong]

Again, IANAL, but if you're include(..)-ing something from another package, that would not necessarily seem to immediately affect what license your own package is under. Compare with GPL-ed packages providing you with a *Config.cmake. find_package(..)-ing those packages does not make your own package GPL.

I agree, in the case if this is added to cmake_common_scripts and I just added BSD-3 license to it, then this would be the only affected package. Though if someone wanted to use the snippet and not use say cmake_common_scripts then they too would need to add a BSD-3 license to there package unless the author gives permission to change the license for this code snippet.