Re: [ng-spice-devel] Licensing


To ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
From Al Davis <aldavis@ieee.org>
Date Fri, 13 Apr 2001 09:20:49 -0700
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On Fri, 13 Apr 2001, Gillespie, Alan wrote:
> Since Jon is a representative of a commercial company,
> which is presumably "closed source" as far as his
> enhancements are concerned, I was wondering what the GPL
> means for his application.

It means that he must contact the copyright owners to negotiate a 
deal.

GPL grants the user certain rights, subject to certain restrictions.  
Mostly, it is built around copyright law.

The owners can grant any arrangement they want.  I can simultaneously 
grant GPL to you and some other arrangement to someone else.  GPL 
imposes no restrictions at all on the owners of the work, provided 
that you can trace and prove ownership.

Where GPL gets sticky is with multiple owners.  If I own part and you 
own part, anyone wanting non-GPL arrangements must negotiate with 
both of us.  This is fine if the number of owners is small and 
traceable, but with many contributors it can get messy or impossible.



> For instance, I submitted a bunch of model bug fixes
> to ng-spice recently.
>
> Can Jon use those in his own version of spice, without
> making his version open source ?

Since Spice is BSD license, yes, he can.  He doesn't even need your 
permission.  Under GPL, he would need your permission to do so.  So 
can Avant!, Cadence, Electronic Workbench, and anyone else.


> If he can't, can he come to an agreement with me, since
> they were originally my fixes, or have I lost the right
> to allow someone to use those fixes in proprietary code ?

You didn't sign over the ownership or grant any exclusive rights, so 
you can do whatever you want.


The licensing issue is a sensitive one to me.  "been there, been 
screwed".  I use a variety of licenses depending on how I want the 
work to be used.  I use GPL for the good stuff.  I have used BSD as 
an invitation for software companies to use it in their product, 
where I don't expect anything back other than recognition.  I use 
public domain for what I consider overhead or just repackaged.  In 
all cases, I use a GPL-compatible license, meaning one that allows 
its use in GPL programs.

Most of the IBIS work is being licensed GPL, but commercial licenses 
with support are for sale.  It will NOT be released BSD or LGPL 
because that shuts off a source of income, unless the IBIS committee 
wants to fully fund it, in which case the license would change to 
something like an "industry standards" license, where compliance to 
the IBIS spec is the primary rule.  As it stands, it is being funded 
by the sale of those commercial licenses.

ACS is the same.  The implicit mixed-mode simulation engine surpasses 
anything else available.

The license on the ACS model compiler is GPL for now, but I want to 
change it to some kind of "industry standard" license, so simulator 
companies could replace the back end to generate code for their 
simulator without the requirement to leak info about the internals of 
their product.  I want to solve this model nonsense once and for all.


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