Re: [ng-spice-devel] proposal for the letter development
Hi all,
Francesco Doni wrote:
>
> I took the letter circulated within the list, applied the changes
> suggested by Steve and gave some personal contributions, I hope this
> will be helpful.
> Please make as many changes as you all require to be necessary.
> It would be nice if a native speaker could make an editing pass at
> the text of the final letter itself and repost it.
I am a native English speaker; English is my one and only human
language. I will be glad to do the final editing pass.
I have also made some changes below which I think greatly strengthen
our case. Note that I do not mention the BSD license in relation
to Spice anywhere. This is because Spice is not licensed under any
of the normal BSD licenses but under its own variation of the license.
I have also downplayed any mention of a new simulator as I feel that
this will also strengthen our case.
Please feel free to comment.
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. Although this
license has allowed many companies to release their own proprietary
simulators, it 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.
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
+-------------------------------------------------+
J. Headley: "God, root, what is difference ?"
G. Haverland: "God can change the byte order on the CPU, root can't."
Partial thread listing:
- Re: [ng-spice-devel] proposal for the letter development, (continued)