proposal for the letter development


To ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it,ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
From Francesco Doni <f.doni@ieee.org>
Date Thu, 27 Apr 2000 15:43:20 +0200
Delivered-To mailing list ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
Mailing-List contact ng-spice-help@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it; run by ezmlm
Reply-To ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it

I took the letter circulated within the list, applied the changes suggested 
by Steve
and gave some personal contributions, I hope this will be helpful.
Please make as many changes as you all require to be necessary.
It would be nice if a native speaker could make an editing pass at the text 
of the
final letter itself and repost it.
Paolo, raid this wave for all of us! ;-)
regards fd


---
Dear Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli,

  We are a voluntary group of engineers/researchers/students who would like
to develop a new spice-like simulator. This initiative was called, though this
should be only a temporary name, "The NG-Spice Project" (New Generation 
Spice).
>>{I prefer the sound of 'Next-Generation Spice', but it's my point of view}<<

  The Spice program you have helped to create, despite no longer supported
or actively developed by The University of California at Berkeley,
remains a standard for electronic circuit design.
  That having been said, it is clear that in the past years, several other 
products
(many commercial and based originally on Spice) have surpassed it, both in 
speed
as in versatility and up to date process support.
  Our wish would be to release the code of our new simulator under the
GNU General Public License (GPL), the license that is perhaps best known by
the GNU software and the Linux kernel. We are still discussing the possibility
to realize few shared libraries which could contain some common function
and especially the models, these could be put under LGPL license.
  Releasing our code under GNU licenses would allow us to use several 
libraries
and lots of other GPL'd code within our software tool, as the Gnu Scientific 
Library
or the readline library, to name but a few.

  The Spice3 source code, as you know, was released under the terms of the
BSD license. This license has actually allowed many companies to release their
own proprietary simulators, based on the original Spice code. However, the 
BSD 
license and the GPL are two incompatible licenses. This means that we cannot 
reuse the Spice3 code for our simulators, and especially the models.
We have an in-depth interest in Spice models due to they are perhaps the most
significant and log-lasting contribution made by the Berkeley CAD and Device 
groups,
and have become an industry standard in their own right. To this end, within 
our
project, we would improve the possibility to easily develop and dynamically 
add
new device models or model topologies to Spice.

  We heard that recently, Dean Hal Varian convinced the University of 
California,
in June 1999, to issue a 'new style' BSD License. This new style
license is GPL compatible indeed, and would allow us to reuse the existing
code of Spice3 in our GPL'd simulator. The new-style 1999 BSD license
represent for us a sort of bridge between the old BSD license policy and the 
GPL one,
while the rights of other Spice3 users will be kept unchanged.
  Therefore, our question is: would it be possible for you (or rather for the 
University of California, the copyright holder) to switch the license of 
Spice3
to the new-style 1999 BSD license?
  This will speed up our developing effort for this project, and will bring 
to a new life
a so valuable software for the scientific and engineering community.

  Mind you, we would acknowledge the contributions of Spice3 and the
University of California at Berkeley in the NG-Spice documentation anyway,
even though the new-BSD license and GPL combination wouldn't legally require 
us
or future derivies to do so.


  We strongly believe that starting the NG-Spice simulator project developing
around an "open-license" scheme is both useful for the electronics and the
academic community, as well as interesting for our personal knowledge.
  Making the existing open-source code of Spice3 legally available for our 
project
purposes, would definitely be an invaluable help.


        With all our regards, looking forward to hearing from you

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


http://ieee.ing.uniroma1.it/ngspice


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