Re: [ng-spice] new guy: licensing issues


To ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
From Manu Rouat <emmanuel.rouat@wanadoo.fr>
Date Tue, 11 Jan 2000 23:43:13 -0500
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Reid van Melle wrote:

> 
> At this point, the company is planning to have me continue development on
> Spice3F5 to improve convergence using some of the published homotopy methods
> etc.  However we noticed that some of the work being done on ng-spice 
>overlaps
> with our own effort.  Since we are not in the business of selling a Spice
> simulator, we are perfectly willing to contribute our own development (where
> relevant) to a GPL product such as ng-spice.  However, there is one 
>problem...
> 
> Since we compile Spice into a library and then compile this into the 
>commercial
> version of our software, a straight GPL license will not work for us.  
>Instead,
> we would need a LGPL version of the software or the option to purchase a
> separate commercial license.  

I suppose that the 'library' spice is called by some graphical front-end?

I understand your point of view , but is the calling of a binary instead
of loading a library such a overhead? One solution would be to make a modular
design (which we plan to do) so that the binary is minimal for you.
Licensing ng-spice under LGPL rather than GPL would solve that problem of 
course.
However , note that we also plan to use the GNU Scientific Library which
is GPL - I haven't really thought about  it, but I'm not sure we can link
an LGPL program on a GPL library (funny situation - it should be the reverse:
the simulator being GPL and the library LGPL)

manu

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