Re: [ng-spice-devel] License issues


To ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
From Manu Rouat <emmanuel.rouat@wanadoo.fr>
Date Wed, 26 Apr 2000 18:12:27 -0400
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Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm sure you're all as bored with this license issue as I am.
> 
> Anyway, I have caught up with my reading and was wondering if
> Manu Rouat sent his email to Prof. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli at
> Berkeley and whether he received an answer. If we could get
> get the spice license changed to the GPL compatible version
> of the BSD license our troubles would be over.

This is exactly our reasoning, but to answer your question: no, I haven't
sent the email in question. I'm currently extremely busy with many
things (among other designing impossible circuits :-) and I'm afraid
I don't have enough time to spend on ngspice. 

> 
> >From my research it seems thet the problem with the original
> BSD license and the GPL is that the license only allows use of
> the software for "educational, research and non-profit purposes"
> and thereby does not allow commercial use. This extra restriction
> would make it incompatible with the GPL.

I recall that there was another restriction that caused problems. It
seems that the spice licence isn't quite the vanilla BSD license, it
has some extra restrictions on it. 
> 
> I have written to Richard Stallman with a copy of the spice license
> seeking clarificartion.

Good initiative, I hope he'll answer soon.

manu

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