Letter to newton (proposal)
Hi all,
I have asked Prof. Newton to subscribe to ng-spice-devel. I hope he had
subscribed, but I am not sure since he did not reply to my letter.
Anyway, I would like to hear your opinion on his last letter.
I have seen no opposition to the shared library model for devices. This
will allow people to release spice device models in binary without
disclosing sources and or without release them under (l)GPL. This is
necessary to include the BSIM3 family into the gpl spice, since prof. Hu
has not yet decided what Open Source model is the best for BSIM3 (4 and
soi).
Code split: It seems that Prof. Newton would like to join the main
spice3f5 code with our ngspice. He wrote:
> We plan to continue spice3 development. We deserve credit for Spice3
> development. We would oppose a split in the development tree. We
> hope you would contribute your changes back to the original version
> (with full credit), as was implied in your original note. We would
> be willing to creat a new version using your modifications.
He is writing that we can continue our development alone, sending
improvements back to them. This seems acceptable, it is in the GPL so it
do not require some sort of authorization from us, as soon as spice3f5
will remain GPL.
Arno wrote:
> And yes, UCB is responsible for giving us spice3, but over
> the last year we have had more ngspice releases than UCB had spice3
> releases in the last ten(?) years. (Hmm, that sounded harsher than I
> intended).
In Newton's letter seems clear the we can continue with our project and he
will not impose any restriction to our release, the only request is to
send them back our improvements. I think that they will test the new
code, do some checks and then release it.
On the user community (Arno):
The ngspice project is currently seeing active development. It has a
CVS tree with SSH and anonymous access, a web site, a FAQ and a number
of mailing lists and as already noted a regular stream of releases.
Building an active community of developers and users is a Hard
Thing(tm). I would like to know from Prof. Newton how he sees his
role in the current ngspice development community.
This is an open question. I hope that Berkeley will set up a server
dedicated to spice3f5. Our IEEE is not very powerful and if the project
will grow, a dedicated server will be necessary. Until our disks do
not start to fry, the actual server will continue its role. The role of
Newton in the community is an open question.
What about maintaining spice3f5 and ng-spice separate, with the former as
a "production" simulator, which incorporates ng-spice improvements only
after a thorough testing and the latter as an "experimental" simulator,
whit a good (but not production) quality ?
Paolo
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