Re: [ng-spice-devel] proposal for the letter development


To ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
From Francesco Doni <f.doni@ieee.org>
Date Sun, 30 Apr 2000 22:36:22 +0200
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The letter looks like the one we were looking for, am I right?
I think that Erik made an important editing pass, and I agree
with his conceptual as well as opportunity changes.
Is there any other feedback?
should any feedback arise, in order not to overlap,
I would ask Erik to be our reviewer, to this purpose
I suggest to establish a deadline for comments.

Thank you Michael for your feedback on the letter draft I posted
the latest version is the one edited by Erik, if you have any comment
let us know.

Erik,
it seems you are an expert about licensing issue, anyway more than me.
Few months ago, in previous posts, I stated that
spice licensing was a particular scheme similar to
the several used at Berkeley for technical software
and with its own usage restrictions. In brief:
- there are two kinds of license with different licensing process fees
  the "educational, research and non-profit purposes" users are restricted
  in order to distribute the software or the documentation both commercially 
or for free,
  "commercial purpose" users must comply and subscribe several statements
- both kind of users have to comply with the Export Administration Regulations
  of the United States Department of Commerce, and the Foreign Assets Control
  Regulation of the United States Department of the Treasury in order to 
redistribute
  the software and/or the documentation.
I pointed out that the licensing problem was not so simple to solve
regardless the mentioned merge incompatibility between BSD and GPL.
What do you think about?


I was fostering a sort of GPL2 license in order to maintain
the "educational, research and non-profit purposes" requiring
commercial purpose users to ask for a written permission, for instance.
Maybe I had sad experiences concerning companies which abused my designs,
therefor to this end I'm now too careful maintaining strong written 
authorization schemes.
BTW, I won't to be misleading, I also proposed to set up a license fee
for commercial users, but this is not the issue, even if I believe (as my 
experience says)
that funds could arise useful to ng-spice infect the gnu-pgp project could
receive funds from the German government, I want to point out that I'm
not actually interested in any license scheme and also fee because
I have never had distribution interests with regard my Berkeley spice 
derivative tool.

Anyway, as I already wrote, I can recode and freely distribute within ng-spice
all the components and module of my tool that the ngspice team will consider
useful for this cooperative effort. Actually I tried to merge my previous code
with ng-spice but I had many difficulties, therefor I think it would be 
better to
define a startup draft within I can solve my conceptual problems.
While doing so we can discuss about interesting futures and ideas,
I attach with this mail the file I mentioned in a previous mail, if there are
questions let me know I would reply in the comprehensive ideas mail.

best regards
franz

spice.pdf


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