Final Version of Letter
Hi all,
I think the two week call for comments period regarding this
letter must now be up. Unless I missed any further comments
the letter is as follows.
Ciao,
Erik
---------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli,
We are a voluntary group of engineers/researchers/students who would
like continue development of the electronic simulator Spice. We have
a web page at :
http://ieee.ing.uniroma1.it/ngspice/
Although the Spice program you helped to create is no longer being
supported or actively developed by The University of California at
Berkeley, it remains a standard for electronic circuit design.
However, over the last decade, several other products (many commercial
and based originally on Spice) have surpassed it, in speed,
versatility and up to date process support.
The goal of our project is to start with the last UCB version, Spice3f5,
and update it to add new features, improve the user interface, improve
the simulation speed and accuracy and improve the compatibility with
other Spice variants. Our aims include making this project free, open
source software much like the Linux kernel and the GNU utilities.This
would allow everyone including researchers and students to have access
to a cheap (free), extensible, electronic simulator.
The problem we have is with the current Spice3f5 license. This license
is too restrictive to allow it to be used with other free software. The
problem is that it only allows use for "educational, research and
non-profit purposes" thereby restricting commercial use. This makes it
incompatible with free software licenses such as the GNU General Public
License (GPL). There are two GPL licensed libraries (readline for
improved command line handling and the GNU Scientific Library) which
would greatly help our development efforts but which cannot be used
with Spice3f5 unless the Spice3f5 license is changed. The GNU General
Pubic License may be viewed here:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
We also note that some have been referring to the Spice license as a BSD
license although this seems not to be the case. There have been a number
of different licenses issued by the University of California, including
the numerous different BSD licenses, some (but not all) of which are
compatible with the GPL.
Recently we heard that Dean Hal Varian had convinced the University of
California, in June 1999, to issue a 'new style' BSD License for the BSD
operating system source code. It is our understanding that this new
style license is GPL compatible and if the Spice3f5 license was changed
to this one, it would allow us to use Spice3f5 code and code licensed
under the GPL in the same piece of software while the rights of other
Spice3 users will remain as they are. Another possibility is to modify
the current license to allow any use, or alternatively, to allow the the
Spice3f5 code to be used either under the current license or the GPL as
the user pleases. Under all of these schemes, the copyright of the
existing code remains with the University of California and the authors
of any new code would hold the copyright of their contributions.
Therefore, our question is: would it be possible for you (or rather for
the University of California, the Spice3f5 copyright holder) to modify
the license of Spice3f5 in one of the ways mentioned above? Doing so
would allow the creation of a new improved Spice program which would be
freely available to everyone interested in using it.
We look forward to hearing from you.
With all our regards,
The NG-Spice Team
Paolo Nenzi
Michael Widlok
etc.....
http://ieee.ing.uniroma1.it/ngspice
--
+-------------------------------------------------+
Erik de Castro Lopo erikd@zip.com.au
+-------------------------------------------------+
"... the industrial-capitalist mode of software production
was doomed to be outcompeted from the moment capitalism
began to create enough of a wealth surplus for many
programmers to live in a post-scarcity gift culture."
-- Eric S. Raymond
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