[ng-spice] Draft letter to Sangiovanni Vincentelli
Hi everybody,
I agree with the letter to Berkeley, it should be slightly
modified in order to point out that we ask to change the policy
even for the previous release of spice if it is not already implied by
the change of the license policy itself.
My personal opinion is that it would be better to address a letter
to the University of California just with motivated requests
concerning the policy they adopted. Moreover I believe that pointing
out that their acknowledged work is more concerned on models rather
than tools, is an important mark in our question.
The reason to write to the institution is that the policy adopted is
usually the same for each software, model included, distributed by the
UC Industrial Liaison Program, publicly or by the several research groups.
(the usual copyright rules of the University of California are at
http://www.ucop.edu/ott/crprimr.html
http://www.ucop.edu/ott/permissn.html)
Therefor I suggest to send it to the EECS department
which is still working mainly on spice models,
(http://www-cad.eecs.berkeley.edu/) in the person of
Richard Newton
Professor and Chair of the
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
563 Cory Hall
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720
Phone: (510) 642 2967
Fax: (510) 643 5052
Email: rnewton@ic.eecs.berkeley.edu
We could also send a personal letter to Prof. Sangiovanni Vincentelli
including the one sent to the university because of its role in several
software development at Berkeley, and his internationally recognized
position.
BTW, despite his interests nowadays are concerned on hardware and
software co-design i.e. Polis software, when I met him in Rome about 3
years ago he said he worked on spice at its beginnings so I'm sure
he knows Donald Pederson (the father of spice).
I believe he could help us to contact the retired Prof. Pederson,
he was in Berkeley the sponsor of freely available spice.
He could be an invaluable help for our purpose.
About the license problem, though I'm not an expert on the subject,
I would point out what I think the other side of the coin.
I agree with the several who wrote about using spice code,
for istance Reid van Melle:
>In fact, you are free to use pieces of Spice code in your
>own simulator and change the license to whatever you wish.
>This is exactly what hundred of companies have been doing
>for years (commercial licenses) resulting in a plethora of Spice
>versions in the marketplace.
The Berkeley issue allow you to change, add or what else and then
sell YOUR product provided few things that I report hereafter
(a) The licensee agrees not to charge for the University of Cal-
ifornia code itself. The licensee may, however, charge for
additions, extensions, or support.
(b) In any product based on the software, the licensee agrees to
acknowledge the research group that developed the software.
This acknowledgment shall appear in the product documenta-
tion.
(c) The licensee agrees to obey all U.S. Government restrictions
governing redistribution or export of the software and docu-
mentation.
(d) For software with additional restrictions (any software
listed in Section 2), the licensee agrees to all additional
terms governing distribution of that software.
(e) The licensee agree to reproduce any copyright notice which
appears on the software and documentation provided under
this agreement on any copy or modification of such made
available to others by licensee.
The main problem I think we could have and at Berkeley
could underline is not the license itself but the overall issue to
comply with the Export Administration Regulations,
and the Foreign Assets Control Regulation of their government.
Infect the only difference between commercial licenses
and no-profit ones is the fee required to process it
(of course excluding the possibility to sell your version of spice).
Having said that, now the question is
Is the Berkeley license to interfere with the GNU one or
vice versa, I believe in the second option.
The GNU software, which could be invaluable for our purpose,
has strict license terms.
Partial thread listing:
- [ng-spice] Draft letter to Sangiovanni Vincentelli, (continued)