Letter to Prof. Vincentelli Draft 2


To ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
From Paolo Nenzi <pnenzi@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
Date Wed, 26 Jan 2000 22:49:01 +0100 (CET)
cc ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
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Reply-To ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it

I have "patched" Manu's letter with some Stephen "code":

Dear Prof. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli,

  The Spice program you have helped to create remains, despite no loger
being 
supported or activelly developped by UCB, a standard for electronic
circuit 
simulations. However, it is clear that in the past years, many other
products 
(many commercial and based originaly on Spice) have surpassed it, both in
speed 
as in versatility.

  We are a group of engineers/researchers/students who would like to 
develop a new spice-like simulator. Our wish would be to release the code
of 
this new simulator under the GPL (General Public Licence), the licence
that 
is possibly best known by the GNU software and the Linux kernel. It is
mandatory 
for us to release our software under the GPL License,because this will
allow us to
use several libraries and lots of GPL'd code for our own project. This
project has 
for name 'The NG-Spice Project' (New Generation Spice) although this is
only a 
temporary name.

  As you know, the Spice3 source code was released under the terms of the
BSD 
license. This license has actually allowed some companies to release their
own 
proprietary simulators, based on the original Spice code. However, the BSD 
licence and the GPL are two incompatible licences. This means that we
cannot 
reuse the Spice3 code for our simulators, especially the models, in which
we 
are most interested. Spice models, are the most significant and
log-lasting 
contribution made by the Berkeley CAD and Device groups, and have become
an
industry standard in their own right.  

  We have heard that recently, Dean Hal Varian convinced the University
of 
California ,in June 1999, to issue a 'new style' BSD Licence. This new
style
license is in fact GPL compatible, and would allow us to reuse the
existing
code of Spice3 in our GPL'd simulator and thus speeding up our work. This
new 
license is compatible with the old BSD one, so the rights of other peoples
who
are using and have used spice3 for their products do not change.  

  Therefore, our question is: would it be possible for you or, rather for
the 
University Of California, the copyright holder, to switch the licence of
Spice3 
to this new license ?

  We strongly believe that starting an analog simulator as an open-source
project
is both useful for the electronics and the academic community, and
interesting for 
our personal knowledge. Making the existing code of Spice3 legally
available for
our purpose would definitely be an invaluable help which will speed up our
project and will bring to a new life a so valuable software for the 
scientific and engineering community.


        With all our regards,

The NG-Spice Team
Paolo Nenzi
Michael Widlok
etc.....


http://ieee.ing.uniroma1.it/ngspice




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