@malgudi

Note that ROS answers is a Q&A page focused on the technical issues on ROS. Thus, most (all?) people here come from technical backgrounds.

--- DISCLAIMER ---

Any responses to questions like this are under no circumstances to be taken as legal advice! This is especially true since there are a lot of variations of different licenses out there.

If you are interested in this topic, there are a lot of good websites out there, e.g. choosealicense, which give good overviews. But they all agree in that they are also NOT to be taken as the only source of legal adivce (and obviously exclude any warranty on what they say/suggest)!

--- END DISCLAIMER ---

The above aside:

According to the ROS wiki, gmapping is currently licensed as

License: CreativeCommons-by-nc-sa-2.0

The nc stands for non-commercial. I guess this should answer your question (mostly...)

Mostly because...

• the original gmapping package has changed to BSD 3-clause
• there is a PR where all contributors to the forked gmapping package (which still is CC-by-nc-sa) agree to change the license to BSD 3-clause as well.

And now this is where it gets really tricky with legal advice. So I'll stop talking and only advice to to consult someone with real expertise in OSS-issues...

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