#179 License of "SetPaths.cmake"?

[onlyjob]

"SetPaths.cmake" have incomplete/ambiguous grant of license. For the full text of the license it refers to "COPYING-CMAKE-SCRIPTS" file which is missing. Please clarify.

Also note that the text of the BSD-3-Clause-ish license used by this project is not canonical therefore "SetPaths.cmake" refers to a diffent flavor of BSD license.

Thanks.

[Robin Stuart]

Hi,

Thank you for drawing attention to this.

I have updated this file to explicitly include the BSD 3-clause license and remove the reference to COPYING-CMAKE-SCRIPTS.

Robin.

[onlyjob]

Thanks, Robin.

Looking at your change I think it is incorrect because it seems that you've changed the license.
As I've said, this project is not using the canonical BSD-3-Clause license. In fact Zint falvour of the BSD-3-Clause license is quite unique -- compare it to the canonical text an you'll see the difference: https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause

Because of this difference it is very unlikely that the project where "SetPaths.cmake" was borrowed from is using the same license. Moreover, original reference to "BSD license" is ambiguous and does not mean BSD-3-Clause. More likely it is a reference to current/new 2-Clause BSD license: https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause

We need to find the original text of the license to be sure.
What is the orign of this file? Where was it taken from?

[Robin Stuart]

Hi,

The original file was contributed by Bogdan Vatra from the exaro project. The original can be found at:

https://code.google.com/archive/p/exaro/

Before that I guess it came from KDE4. I agree it was probably originally released under the 2-clause license.

What would you suggest should be done about this?

Robin.

[onlyjob]

We should do "the right thing", as always. :)

Since original license can not be changed without explicit permissions from copyright owners, we have to find the text of the original license. I did some archeology and found that COPYING-CMAKE-SCRIPTS file is missing from the "exaro" sources:

https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-source/v2/code.google.com/exaro/source-archive.zip

Here are some COPYING-CMAKE-SCRIPTS files:

• https://gitlab.physik.uni-kiel.de/geant4/geant4/blob/5435bcec36d0ce607412351ea189c00ae413810a/cmake/Modules/COPYING-CMAKE-SCRIPTS
• https://phabricator.kde.org/D5761
• https://invent.kde.org/kde/digikam/blob/master/COPYING-CMAKE-SCRIPTS
• https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/blob/master/CMakeScripts/COPYING-CMAKE-SCRIPTS
• https://invent.kde.org/kde/krita/blob/master/COPYING-CMAKE-SCRIPTS

I recommend to use the exact text of the license from any of those links except the last one.

[Robin Stuart]

Okay, thanks. As you suggested I have copied the license from one of these sources. I haven't put it as a seperate file as I don't see any advantage to doing so. Are you happy for me to close this ticket now?

Robin.

[onlyjob]

Thank you. Everything is perfect now. :)

Safe to close.