Add in a LICENSE file.

[clalancette]

Signed-off-by: Chris Lalancette clalancette@openrobotics.org

[clalancette]

CI:

• Linux
• Linux-aarch64
• Windows

[cottsay]

The license text references a copyright holder, and I've typically seen the 3-clause BSD license include the copyright lines at the beginning. Is there a particular reason to omit it here?

[clalancette]

The license text references a copyright holder, and I've typically seen the 3-clause BSD license include the copyright lines at the beginning. Is there a particular reason to omit it here?

You bring up a good point, which caused me to examine a couple of different things.

First of all, the copyright checking in this package was disabled. That means we didn't even know if this file conformed to the LICENSE style as laid out in ament_copyright. I've now fixed that in 1fb1d3d .

The second thing I did was to check out what other BSD-style LICENSE files around our codebase looked like. To summarize, I found the following:

1. LICENSE file that has no copyright holder, and no mention of "BSD License" at the top (like this PR): 4 repositories
2. LICENSE file that has no copyright holder, but has a mention of "BSD License" at the top: 2 repositories
3. LICENSE file that has copyright holders and a mention of "BSD License" at the top: 10 repositories

Apparently our linting accepts all 3 styles, so it is not a problem for linting. As for what it should look like, I actually think style 2 is the best, as it is a LICENSE file, not a copyright notice. That said, it looks like the bulk of what we have does include both the "BSD License" and the copyright holders, so I'll switch this one to go with the majority there.

[clalancette]

CI again:

• Linux
• Linux-aarch64
• Windows