[ng-spice] Other consideration on NGSpice
Hello to you all,
this is the first time I am writing to these mailing lists,
despite I followed the discussion since its early stages
when ng-spice was only a project within the ieee branches
in Rome, as Paolo knows I'm always busy but I'm still
trying to give my contributions to the spice development.
Hereafter are a few thoughts.
I prepared two other mail concerning the letter to Berkeley
and some technical ideas.
Joking with Paolo I wrote once that we could think
to a free licensing policy able to finance this project
in the same way that no-profit or educational organization
actively do in US in order to fund their effort.
The useful contribution of Reid van Melle on the
subject of organizing our effort moved me to give more
details about what I was thinking when joking with Paolo.
At the risk of starting a tricky as well as endless discussion.
I think that everybody could agree with me if I write
that in US is a common practice and is not surprising
if an educational institution or a no-profit organization
sell its research results to companies in order to fund
the research project itself. The same practice is not widely
followed in Europe, indeed.
Upon this consideration my idea was to constitute all together
such as a no-profit organization under which develop and distribute
freely NGSpice, only companies which would use the software
within a commercial product should be charge for it, of course
in a competitive and reasonable way.
The working model I had in mind was like IETF, and I try to explain.
(see also http://www.ietf.org/overview.html)
1)not a membership organization (no cards, no dues, no secrets).
2)a open international community concerned with the evolution
of spice. To be opened to any interested individual.
3)the actual technical work should be done in working groups.
To become a participant, one merely becomes active in one or more
working groups by asking to be added to the wg's mailing list.
Now the question is how to use and manage the incoming
from licenses to companies, it's clear that a little operation
center would be required and I think that ieee branches here in
Rome, where the project took place, would be pleased to sponsor
and support it, then an "activities management group" should cover
the required overall managing role.
I believe that funds would be necessary and should be used for
documentation, licenses, general expenses including registrations etc.,
as well as tools required by the working groups. Last but no least to
finance meetings and conferences that could be held with companies
sponsorship.
About the name for ng-spice, that we require as soon as possible,
I merely suggest to use NGSpice as nickname for Next Generation Spice
mainly because is immediately clear that it is a spice like tool,
then "Next Generation Spice" is not a bad name, indeed.
Bye
comments are welcome
Partial thread listing: