RE: Collaboration on spice3f5 GPL (fwd)


To ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
From Paolo Nenzi <pnenzi@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
Date Tue, 20 Jun 2000 17:14:59 +0200 (CEST)
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This is the message Newton sent me. It is promising but I am not sure
about the time of the GPL conversion.

Regards,
Paolo

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 06:50:45 -0700
From: Richard Newton <rnewton@ic.eecs.berkeley.edu>
To: 'Paolo Nenzi' <pnenzi@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
Cc: "'alberto@ic.eecs.berkeley.edu'" <alberto@ic.eecs.berkeley.edu>
Subject: RE: Collaboration on  spice3f5 GPL 

>>> comments

Dear Prof. Newton,

  The ng-spice development group welcomes your proposal to release the 
spice3f5 under the GPL and that you will contribute to the process of 
developing Spice.
>>>great
 
   As you have written, the first step will be the modification of the
header of source files and authors' name collection. We have collected most
of the names that appear in the headers files and added them to the AUTHORS 
file of the ng-spice distribution. We think that the whole process will take

no more than a week. We think that this should be done on the "official" 
Berkeley release of spice3f5. Then, each group working on spice can get 
the GPL'ed sources and propagate the license change in their works.
>>>I agree

  We welcome your proposal of collaboration on Spice development, and we
will contribute to it with your development team. However, as was pointed
out 
on the ng-spice mailing list, in ten months, the ng-spice team has produced 
more releases than UCB had in the previous ten years. The ng-spice team is 
aiming to be a development research project and to be working to quick
release 
cycles.
>>>That is great, but what is your point? Clearly you are more active today
with Spice. But you began with Spice, right?. We do not have a "development
team" any more (at least not for now) and I would hope we could consider you
guys the Spice development team for a while. As I said, I would simply like
us all to respect the origin of the original work (that respect is the basis
of the GPL approach, by the way), and help us to make everyone's life easier
by doing the base work and posting it on our site, and keeping our site
updated. 

  In addition, you have expressed the desire to avoid splitting the
development trees. While GPL cannot forbid a split, we are interested in
working together with your group. We can work on two different but
synchronized trees; one experimental tree and one production tree. While we 
may provide support only for the latter, the experimental tree can be
used to test new features that will find their way to the production tree
only after a test phase.
>>> Sounds very good.

  Another question is documentation. We have few documents regarding spice
internals and this makes debugging a painstaking process. At times we are
modifiyng code which we do not fully understand, with the risk of closing 
one bug and opening many others. At his time we are having exactly this kind
of problem with the Poles-Zeroes analysis. We would ask if you can provide
us with support or docs to help us in the process.
>>> Do you have the six ERL Memos by Quarles? Those six volumes represent
most of the documentation we have right now. If not, I would be pleased to
send them to you.

  Finally, there is the ng-spice community. In the past year, our project
has gathered a small but active community of students and professionals.
We think that this community must continue to exists and we hope that you
and your group will join it, to create an even large development
community.
>>> As I said, we are not doing active development right now, except for the
BSIM modelling work. There are others interested in GPL and doing active
Spice development, especially at MIT, I would be happy to put you in touch
with them once we have the basic GPL work done and on our site. They could
join the ng-spice team and community.

>>>I will check with our Campus regarding acceptable GPL wording, etc.

Regards,
The ng-spice devel team


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