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

[Al Davis <ad60@freeelectron.net>]

On Friday 21 May 2004 08:45 am, Charles Lepple wrote:
> > 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 don't need THAT kind of inspiration.  There is plenty from 
commercial $$ software.  It's a lot more advanced than 
LT-Spice.  

I wasn't impressed by LT-Spice.  I have one benchmark that ran 
very fast in gnucap that took so long I stopped it in LT-Spice.  
Even NG-Spice did it in an amount of time I was willing to 
wait.  There are other circuits that LT-Spice does very well 
at, and the Gnucap does very poorly at.

> 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 [*].

That's a real advantage of commercial software, and one you can 
help us with.  With money, they can pay people to do the boring 
part of the job.  Free software is driven by what people want 
to do.  I think my time is better spent on the algorithms.

You can make a major contribution by collecting models.  There 
is web space available.  You can make a bigger contribution by 
testing them on the free tools, and reporting what works and 
what doesn't.

> 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.

That is why the seemingly minor contributions are so important.  
People contribute gratis to the libraries of commercial 
software.  The company gives them nothing back, other than the 
proprietary core at the price of a lock-in.  Free software 
exists because of sharing in kind.  The LT-Spice project has 
lots of user contributed stuff, yet if you ask Mike anything 
technical he brags about how much he knows, but won't share any 
knowledge.

Gnucap is looking for people to work on usability.