[Pkg-electronics-devel] Ngspice

[Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan]

On Jan 22, 2008 1:57 PM, Gudjon I. Gudjonsson <gudjon at gudjon.org> wrote:
>
> As far as I understand, ngspice can be put into non-free without any problems.
> I would very much like to get ngspice into Debian and I have been thinking
> about signing an ITP bug but if you want to do it Ramakrishnan, it is even
> better :)

I have it packaged up somewhere and had been using it.

I just noticed that the ngspice upstream is horribly out of date. The
last release (rework-17) was sometime in 2005 and since then the
University of California, Berkeley has changed the ngspice license to
BSD. The components that constitute (AFAIK) ngspice are:

1. spice 3f5
2. xspice from Georgia Tech
3. cider from univ of california, berkeley.
4. Code written by ngspice developers, which included new code and
modifications to the above components.

Item 1 is now BSD licensed.
Item 2 is in public domain.
Item 3 seem to have a (old) BSD-like license.
Item 4 (new additions) are in BSD according to ngspice webpages.

I think ngspice upstream will have to do a new release with the
updated spice-3f5 license at the minimum. XSpice is  not an issue, as
it is explicitly Public Domain. Cider is an issue. It restricts
selling. A snippet of the copyright notice is below:

    (a)  The recipient agrees not to charge for the University of
         California code itself.  The recipient may, however, charge
         for additions, extensions, or support.

I have written to ngspice developers today regarding the new BSD
license for 3f5. Not sure whether I will get a reply..

I will try to study the code more and post an analysis at d-legal. If
it can pass into non-free (but buildd won't build them for every
architecture?), that in itself is a great  advance.

Also spice-3f5 as such, if it can be compiled and built on a recent
GNU/Linux system, can be packaged and uploaded into main, as it is
DFSG-free.

regards
-- 
  Ramakrishnan VU3RDD