Re: gEDA-user: SPICE/gEDA going to the LDP . . .

["Charles Lepple" <clepple@ghz.cc>]

Al Davis said:
> On Thursday 20 May 2004 09:51 pm, Stuart Brorson wrote:
>> Happy reading, and I look forward to your comments,
>
> Why do you promote LT-Spice?  It's a closed source rip of spice.
> Closed source "free" software is a major threat to real free
> software.

... as well as a major source of inspiration. As in many other fields, it
never hurts to know what the competition is doing.

I'm not an analog expert by any means. So when I go to simulate a simple
transistor circuit, for instance, it is much less painful for me to choose
'2N4401' from a list in LT-Spice, than to extract all of the Spice
parameters from a datasheet to feed into *spice or gnucap [*].

Unfortunately, when people are evaluating free software, it's the initial
impression that counts. And if it's a question of freedom versus
usability, there are a lot of people who will go with usability.

[*] Forgive me if I overlooked a collection of off-the-shelf device models
in gnucap-- I'm using the version from Debian unstable, and it already
looks like there are some pieces missing from the package. On the other
hand, there's no mention of them in the manual.

-- 
Charles Lepple
http://www.ghz.cc/charles/