Re: [ng-spice-devel] Letter to Newton


To ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
From Erik de Castro Lopo <erikd@zip.com.au>
Date Mon, 19 Jun 2000 11:07:35 +0000
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Paolo Nenzi wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> This is the draft of the letter to Richard Newton:

This looks really good Paolo. I'll just do a quick editing pass.

> 
>
Dear Prof. Newton,

  The ng-spice development group welcomes your proposal to release the 
spice3f5 under the GPL and that you will contribute to the process of 
developing Spice.
 
   As you have written, the first step will be the modification of the
header of source files and authors' name collection. We have collected most
of the names that appear in the headers files and added them to the AUTHORS 
file of the ng-spice distribution. We think that the whole process will take 
no more than a week. We think that this should be done on the "official" 
Berkeley release of spice3f5. Then, each group working on spice can get 
the GPL'ed sources and propagate the license change in their works.

  We welcome your proposal of collaboration on Spice development, and we
will contribute to it with your development team. However, as was pointed out 
on the ng-spice mailing list, in ten months, the ng-spice team has produced 
more releases than UCB had in the previous ten years. The ng-spice team is 
aiming to be a development research project and to be working to quick 
release 
cycles. 

  In addition, you have expressed the desire to avoid spliting the 
development 
trees. While GPL cannot forbid a split, we are interested in working together 
with your group. We can work on two different but synchronized trees; one 
experimental tree and one production tree. While we may provide support only 
for the latter, the experimental tree can be used to test new features that 
will find their way to the production tree only after a test phase.

  Another question is documentation. We have few documents regarding spice
internals and this makes debugging a painstaking process. At times we are
modifiyng code which we do not fully understand, with the risk of closing 
one bug and opening many others. At his time we are having exactly this kind
of problem with the Poles-Zeroes analysis. We would ask if you can provide
us with support or docs to help us in the process.

  Finally, there is the ng-spice community. In the past year, our project
has gathered a small but active community of students and professionals.
We think that this community must continue to exists and we hope that you
and your group will join it, to create an even large development
community.

Regards,
The ng-spice devel team

-- 
+-------------------------------------------------+
     Erik de Castro Lopo     erikd@zip.com.au
+-------------------------------------------------+
"Windows was created to keep stupid people away from UNIX."
  -- Tom Christiansen

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