Re: gEDA-user: TwoStageAmp example

[al davis <ad136@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday 02 April 2007 13:58, Stuart Brorson wrote:
> One thing to worry about:  Ngspice is licenced under BSD
> version 1, which apparently has some technical problems.  I
> believe the copyright is owned by the Regents of the Univ of
> Calif, and they never relinquished copyright or control, or
> something like that.
>
> If you compile in readline, then you are mixing GPL code into
> something which doesn't like the GPL.  There is some
> incompatability of the GPL with the old BSD licence which I
> don't understand.  Paolo Nenzi, the project lead of ngspice,
> didn't like the readline stuff (which I submitted) due to
> this license incompatability.  It never bothered me, but I'm
> not a license purist.

The issue is redistribution.  If you redistribute something made 
of parts that are licensed differently, you must comply with 
both licenses.

Suppose one license says "You must include the word 'aardvark' 
somewhere in the documentation", and the other one says "You 
must NOT include the word 'aardvark' anywhere in the 
documentation".  That kills it.  You cannot simultaneously 
comply with both.

It is issues like this that caused NG-spice to be removed from 
Debian, the KDE/QPL issue, and the firefox/iceweasel issue.

This is what I meant in another thread when I said Debian 
is "strict about being free" and Fedora "not so strict about 
being free".  Debian will omit a package on a licensing issue 
like this.  Fedora is more likely to overlook it.  It is not a 
issue with NetBSD and Gentoo because they don't redistribute.  
They just link to the official site.

That's one of the benefits of the plugins in gnucap.  The core 
is GPL.  If plugins are distributed separately, they can have 
their own license.  There is no longer a conflict.


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