Re: [ng-spice] Draft letter to Sangiovanni Vincentelli


To ng-spice <ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
From Stephen Tell <tell@cs.unc.edu>
Date Wed, 26 Jan 2000 14:44:58 -0500 (EST)
Delivered-To mailing list ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
In-Reply-To <388F97C9.8A1FB183@wanadoo.fr >
Mailing-List contact ng-spice-devel-help@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it; run by ezmlm
Reply-To ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it


> What d'ya guys think? 

Looks like a good start, and I think the content is about right. That
leaves us with mainly stylistic concerns.  I think a few tweaks here and
there could greatly aid the readability of the letter.  At the risk of
starting an endless discussion, here are a few thoughts.


On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, Manu Rouat wrote:

> 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 (with a possible exception for the models which 
> could be  put under LGPL). Releasing our code under this licence would
> allow us to use several libraries (among other the Gnu Scientific Library
> and the readline library) and lots of other 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.

While the intent is clear, this paragraph doesn't read very well due to
the many parentheses.   I would give the LGPL/model comment its own
sentence if you think it important, and leave out the GSL/readline
parenthetical alltogether.


>       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).

You might add that we're interested in the models because they are perhaps 
the most significant and long-lasting contribution made by the
Berkeley spice team, 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. 
> 
>       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 ?

The first time I read this (not carefully enough), I thought you wanted
them to switch spice3 to GPL.  I'd reword this as "... to switch the
license of Spice3 to the new-style 1999 BSD license."

 
>       We believe that starting an analog simulator as an open-source project
> is both useful for the electronics community, and interesting for our
> personnal knowledge. Making the existing code of Spice3 legally available 
>for
> our purpose would definitely be an invaluable help.
 
Strictly speaking, Spice3 is already open-source...

>       With all our regards,
> 
> The NG-Spice Team
> Paolo Nenzi
> Michael Widlok
> etc.....
> 
> 
> (add the url of the NGspice page here)

Would it be a good idea to point out that we will probably acknowledge the
contributions of Spice3 and the University of California at Berkeley in
the NG-Spice documentation anyway, even though the new-BSD license and 
GPL combination wouldn't legally require us or future derivies to do so?


--

Work has kept me from contributing much to the list or the project
recently, but I'd very much like to see it succede and not get bogged down
by having two seperate development trees.    If you thing it might help,
I'd be happy to take an editing pass at the text of the letter itself and
repost it.   But too many authors&editors seldom help any text - two or
three are probably sufficient.

Steve



-- 
Steve Tell | tell@cs.unc.edu | http://www.cs.unc.edu/~tell | KF4ZPF
On Leave from UNC working at Chip2Chip, Inc.  tell@chip2chip.com/919-929-0991



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