Draft letter to Sangiovanni Vincentelli


To ng-spice <ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
From Manu Rouat <emmanuel.rouat@wanadoo.fr>
Date Wed, 26 Jan 2000 19:56:41 -0500
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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.

        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).

        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 ?

        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.


        With all our regards,

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


(add the url of the NGspice page here)

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What d'ya guys think?


manu

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