Re: gEDA-user: Ngspice vs. Gnucap vs. ???

[John Sheahan <jrsheahan@optushome.com.au>]

Thanks for the update.
I agree that spice licensing is vague.
I do note the UCB website advertising itself as spice's homepage 
http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/Classes/IcBook/SPICE/

and links to a distribution page 
http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/Classes/IcBook/tools.html

which states
The popularity of the SPICE circuit simulator has translated into
various offerings, suited for different compute platforms. SPICE3, the
latest Berkeley offering. It has the advantage of being freely
available, to support a wide variety of models, and to run on all UNIX
platforms. It is downloadable.

now what does 'freely available' mean? And the source is distributed. 

john




> -- Cut here --
> From: John Dalton <john.dalton@bigfoot.com>
> 
> > I thought spice was bsd. have the others been rewritten or am I off base?
> 
> My understanding is that the current version of Berkeley SPICE is not BSD, but
> is free for non-commercial use only.  Most people ignore these restrictions
> (or have licensed it from Berkeley?).  SPICE is not suitable for those who
> want to simultaneously obey the law and require that software be available
> for all fields of endeavour.
> 
> Some caveats on the above.
> 1) Earlier versions may be under a different license.
> 2) I can't find an explicit license file for SPICE anywhere in the source
>    distribution, or on the web.
> 
> I'm basing the above on an email in the debian archives:
>   http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/debian-devel-199911/msg01989.html
> 
> Also, it is interesting to look at the copyright notices in the source files
> for the SPICE 3f4 distribution.
> 
> Here is the copyright message from the source file 'main.c' in the
> SPICE 3f4 source:
> 
>   /**********
>   Copyright 1990 Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.
>   Author: 1986 Wayne A. Christopher, U. C. Berkeley CAD Group 
>   **********/
>    
> No mention of BSD license conditions here.  I guess 'written by Berkeley' does
> not equate to 'released under the BSD'.
> 
> Other bits (src/lib/mac and some jfet models) are copyright Macquarie Univeristy:
> 
>   /**********
>   Copyright 1992
>   Author: 1992 Anthony E. Parker, Macquarie University, Sydney Australia.
>   **********/
> 
> Again, no mention of the BSD.
> 
> To complicate things, the sparse matrix library used by SPICE 3f4 code *is*
> released under the BSD:
> 
> **IN SUMMARY**: SPICE is not free, though a small part of the code base (380k
> out of 10000k) is released under the BSD.
> 
> If you have any information to the contrary, please reply to this message
> and correct me!
> 
> 
> As far as I know, ngspice is currently BSD SPICE with bug fixes and recent patches
> applied.  It aims to be a GPLd SPICE, but the current release requires a major
> rewrite to eliminate all Berkeley code to achieve this aim.  Since ng-spice
> is a Berkeley derivative, it operates under the same restrictions as Berkeley SPICE.
> 
> 
> GnuCap is a clean room implementation of SPICE.  It is GPLd and satisfied the
> Free Software Guidelines.
> 
> 
> I tried the various spices about a year ago (under Debian).  A summary,
> of my experiences is:
> --- ngspice: I couldn't get it to run.
> --- SPICE+Nutmeg: It worked, though it sometimes didn't convergence.
> --- GnuCap (was ACS): It worked well, but some models I required had
>   not yet been implemented.
> 
> Regards
> John