Letter to Newton


To ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
From Paolo Nenzi <pnenzi@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
Date Mon, 19 Jun 2000 11:42:09 +0200 (CEST)
Delivered-To mailing list ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
Mailing-List contact ng-spice-devel-help@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it; run by ezmlm
Reply-To ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it

Hi all,

This is the draft of the letter to Richard Newton:

Dear Prof. Newton,

  The ng-spice development group welcomes you proposal to release spice3f5
under GPL and will contribute to the process. 

  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 appears in the headers files in the AUTHORS file in ng-spice
distribution. We think that the whole process will take a no more than a week.
We think that  this should be done on the "official" Berkeley's release of
spice3f5 and then each group working on spice can get the GPL'ed sources and 
then propagate the license change in their works. 

  Regarding our collaboration on the program development, we welcome your 
proposal  and will contribute to it with your development team. Anyway, as
was pointed out in the list, ng-spice had in ten months more releases that
spice3 had in the previous ten years. This because ng-spice wants to be a
development research project. You have expressed the desire to not split the
development trees,  and while GPL cannot forbid this, we are interested in 
working together  with your group. We can work on two different but
syncronized 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, we are modifiyng
code which, sometimes, we do not even know what is doing, with the risk of
closing a bug and opening many others. At his time we are having 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.

  The ng-spice community is another issue. In an year of life, 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


-----------------------------------

Express your feelings.

Paolo


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