Re: [ng-spice-devel] RE: Porting of spice3f5 to open source (fwd)
[Reformatted to better distinguish the message Paolo sent and the
following response from prof. Newton]
On Thu, May 25, 2000 at 02:42:36PM +0200, Paolo Nenzi wrote:
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 05:34:25 -0700
> From: Richard Newton <rnewton@ic.eecs.berkeley.edu>
> To: 'Paolo Nenzi' <pnenzi@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
> Subject: RE: Porting of spice3f5 to open source
>
>
> > Dear Prof. Newton,
> >
> > Thank you for your interest in our project. We have read the letter you
> > sent to the ng-spice-development mailing list and would like to ask you
> > something some details.
> >
> > We would like a clarification on "make the code compliant with 'Open
> > Source'. What exactly is required ? Adding a copyright header to each
> > file is easy to do. What source modification are you referring to ?
>
> Modifications are simply to make the copyright GPL. Just that.
I am very much in favor of releasing spice3 under the GPL. I estimate
these modifications could be done over a weekend.
> > As you may have seen on our web site, we are aiming at the
> > development of a GPL covered circuit simulator based on spice3,
> > but with new features. In your letter it is not clear if you are
> > going to continue the development of spice3f5 or simply change its
> > license. How would UCB react to a split in the development tree ?
>
> 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.
We have credited UCB and any other author we could identify the
AUTHORS file. If they would like to see more authors credited, we can
add them. 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).
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.
Regards,
--
Arno
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