Re: [ng-spice] Licensing issues


To ng-spice <ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
From Paolo Nenzi <pnenzi@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
Date Fri, 3 Sep 1999 08:26:31 +0200 (CEST)
Delivered-To mailing list ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
In-Reply-To <37CEEFAB.E4683782@wanadoo.fr >
Mailing-List contact ng-spice-help@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it; run by ezmlm
Reply-To ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it



On Thu, 2 Sep 1999, Manu Rouat wrote:

> But here is an alternative: suppose that we GPL the simulator only, but
> allow for device models to be distributed under another license (possibly
> even as an object file without source code). The code base that has to be
> replaced becomes much smaller - if we dump out a whole bunch of useless 
>things
> (like that horrible 'help' utility) than we can achieve our goal much 
>faster.
Yes, this seems a good idea, little by little we will replace the
simulator code and build an interface for models: motorola and IBM (not
sure for the latter) have developed some stardands for devices. Give a
look at ftp.sematech.org. We may even write the ngfront-end and in c++, to
use parts of ACS code and to better integrate ngspice with verilog (kev
?).

> The key issue is: is it worth the trouble? Personnaly I think it is, but
> it does mean that we have to think very carefully about the modified GPL
> license we need to use. 

As soon as we use dlopen modules we are completely in GPL: ngspice will
work well without non GPL models, these new models will be never linked in
ngspice, they will be contined in shared libraries and inserted in the
code via dlopen.

Paolo


Partial thread listing: