Re: [ng-spice-devel] License issues
Paolo Nenzi wrote:
>
> Ehi, anyone has a copy of the letter to Sangiovanni, I would like to
> finish it, submit it to the list and then send it. As I wrote, I have a
> week of "relax"
Hi Paulo et al,
Here is the letter from the mailing list archive. I suggest you
hold off sending it until we find out the specifics of the
incompatiblity of the SPICE license with the GPL. I have contacted
Richard Stallman in regard to this and he has replied asking for
a copy of the current SPICE license. I send the contents of the
COPYING file from the rework-10 release.
When we get RMS's opinion as to what is wrong with the current
license we can then explain to UCB what specifically is wrong,
how it can be fixed and the benefits of fixing it.
This should be relatively easy to sell to UCB. We will make the point
that there are numerous commercial verisons of SPICE based on their
code. The proliferation of many versions has resulted in
incompatibility between versions and that we hope to generate a free,
open source industry standard verion of SPICE. Most importantly,
this will provide students with a fully free, uncrippled, open
source SPICE.
Ciao,
Erik
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Dear Prof. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli,
The Spice program you have helped to create remains, despite
no loger being supported or activelly developped by UCB, a standard
for electronic circuit simulations. However, it is clear that in the
past years, many other products (many commercial and based originaly
on Spice) have surpassed it, both in speed as in versatility.
We are a group of engineers/researchers/students who would
like to develop a new spice-like simulator. Our wish would be to
release the code of this new simulator under the GPL (General Public
Licence), the licence that is possibly best known by the GNU software
and the Linux kernel (with a possible exception for the models which
could be put under LGPL). Releasing our code under this licence would
allow us to use several libraries (among other the Gnu Scientific
Library
and the readline library) and lots of other GPL'd code for our own
project. This project has for name 'The NG-Spice Project' (New
Generation
Spice) although this is only a temporary name.
As you know, the Spice3 source code was released under the
terms of the BSD license. This license has actually allowed some
companies to release their own proprietary simulators, based on the
original Spice code. However, the BSD licence and the GPL are two
incompatible licences. This means that we cannot reuse the Spice3 code
for our simulators (especially the models, in which we are most
interested).
We have heard that recently, Dean Hal Varian convinced the University
of California ,in June 1999, to issue a 'new style' BSD Licence. This
new style
license is in fact GPL compatible, and would allow us to reuse the
existing
code of Spice3 in our GPL'd simulator.
Therefore, our question is: would it be possible for you (or rather
for the University Of California, the copyright holder) to switch the
licence
of Spice3 to this new license ?
We believe that starting an analog simulator as an open-source project
is both useful for the electronics community, and interesting for our
personnal knowledge. Making the existing code of Spice3 legally
available for
our purpose would definitely be an invaluable help.
With all our regards,
The NG-Spice Team
Paolo Nenzi
Michael Widlok
etc.....
--
+-------------------------------------------------+
Erik de Castro Lopo erikd@zip.com.au
+-------------------------------------------------+
"Using Java as a general purpose application development language is
like going big game hunting armed with Nerf weapons."
-- Author Unknown
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