Licensing issues


To ng-spice <ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
From Manu Rouat <emmanuel.rouat@wanadoo.fr>
Date Thu, 02 Sep 1999 23:44:11 +0200
Delivered-To mailing list ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
Mailing-List contact ng-spice-help@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it; run by ezmlm
Organization la Guilde
Reply-To ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
Sender rouat@war.wanadoo.com


Hi all,


we have all noticed that there are a few important issues about the
license of ngspice. Currently, ngspice is licensed under the BSD licence,
and most of the code is copyrighted by the University of Berkeley.
I do think that most people agree with me that the GPL license would be
preferable, for several philosophical reasons (for software freedom)
but also practical reasons (using the readline library for instance).

However, to achieve this, we would need to recode nearly everything, so
that eventually the majority of the code is copyrighted by the ngspice group.
Then we can change the license to the GPL. Everyone realises that this is
a very difficult task, since the existing code base is already large.

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.

This also makes sense, because I doubt that many vendors would be willing to
give their code away under the GPL.

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. 


manu


-- 
"In the Beginning was the Word - then came the fucking word processor.
Then came the thought processor, then came the Death of literature.
And so it goes."  The Poet - Hyperion


Partial thread listing: