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. _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
