Re: gEDA-user: strange build failure

[al davis <ad106@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 05 December 2006 16:43, Stuart Brorson wrote:
> > This was when I found out
> > about the real impact of the NGspice licensing problems,
> > which brings up a serious lesson we all need to learn.  I
> > think the NGspice developers still don't understand what
> > the real problem was.
>
> Ummm, what is the problem?  Is it just the BSD ver. 1 licence
> thing, or something more?

No. It is not the BSD ver 1 thing.  If that was the only issue, 
Debian would put it in as "non-free".

Remember ...  For a long time Debian omitted KDE because of a 
license issue.  KDE was GPL, but linked to a library that was 
licensed QPL, which is not GPL compatible.  QPL and GPL are 
both OK, but not linked into the same binary.  Eventually this 
was solved by changing the license on the library to GPL.

More recently, look at the Firefox issue.  Debian would not 
include the Firefox graphic because of a license issue.  They 
shipped a modified Firefox with the old Free graphic logo.  The 
Mozilla foundation said "the Brand requires our logo, or call 
it something else".  So now we have Iceweasel, which is a pure 
GPL variant of Firefox.  To see the issue, ask .... we need a 
logo for Iceweasel.  How about making it by changing the colors 
of the Firefox logo.  Sorry, you are not allowed to make a 
derivative work of the logo.  That was the issue in the first 
place.

With that background ,,,    NGspice collects all that is Spice.  
Some of the extras came from unknown places with unknown 
licenses.  Mostly, it was academic stuff where each one made 
its own one paragraph license sort of BSD like, but with subtle 
differences in the wording, just enough to be incompatible, 
like the KDE-QT issue.  Removing all of the offending code puts 
it back to just plain Spice.

The lesson here is just thinking "I want everyone to be able to 
use this", and wording it wrong, you may accidentally inject a 
subtlety that will prevent the users you want most from using 
it.

Debian is extremely strict at being absolutely legal and holding 
the moral high ground.  Comparing the distributions, this is 
the primary distinguishing characteristic of Debian.

So, why don't Gentoo and NetBSD have this problem?  It is my 
understanding that they don't really distribute.  They just 
provide a script that downloads from the official source.

Why do I know this???    NGspice was in Debian for a while, then 
was removed.  I discovered it when I was trying to make an 
EDA-Knoppix disk, and "apt-get install ngspice" didn't work.  A 
google search revealed the dirt.

The BSD ver 1 license has an interesting subtlety that the 
closed source developers love to exploit.  Derivative works 
have no strings attached.  You can take the code, edit it into 
a new code block that does the same thing.  Now you can do 
anything you want. .. make it proprietary ... release under 
GPL ...   you can even patent your changes and prevent the 
original author from extending his own work.

Berkeley would not change it because it does exactly what they 
want to do, which is technology transfer.  The goal is to get 
the technology incorporated into products.



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