Re: Re: Standard implementation of constant, copyright or not ?
Hi,
On Thu, 2013-07-11 at 21:08 +0200, Bastien ROUCARIES wrote:
Hi,
I plan to package adms on the behalf of debian science in order to package qucs.
I have a legal problem:
Some file are :
Copyright <A9> 2007Accellera Organization, Inc.
Standard definitions
This file contains the standard definition package constants.vams
for Verilog-AMS HDL.
Extracted from standard book
http://www.eda.org/verilog-ams/htmlpages/tc-docs/lrm/2.0/stddef.html
The file is here:
https://github.com/upverter/ADMS/blob/master/admsXml/constants.vams
I do not believe it is copyrightable.
Who has the copyright doesn't really matter. What matters is what
permissions the license gives you. From
https://github.com/upverter/ADMS/blob/master/COPYING
it seems that the code is under the LGPL-2.1 - which means you can
redistribute it. You are, however, not allowed to remove the
copyright.
Sorry to dig up such an old thread; I found this when I was looking
to update the header files in ADMS to the latest ones, which are
part of Verilog-AMS LRM 2.4, copyright 2014 Accellera Systems Initiative.
I think there are some errors in the posts in this thread, which
ought to be corrected.
The files "constants.vams" and "disciplines.vams" are part of the
copyrighted LRM. As such, they should not have been included in the
ADMS source code under LGPL.
(The copyright date is also incorrect, it should be 2000, since these
files were extracted from the LRM 2.0:
http://www.eda.org/verilog-ams/htmlpages/tc-docs/lrm/2.0/cover.html
)
The values in that mere list of facts (constants.vams) are actually tricky;
NIST has updated the value of the electron charge (for example) as its "best
accepted value" has changed, and some models use outdated values. If you
extracted your diode model parameters using the value of P_Q from Spice 3f5
(which used 1.60219e-19), you would not want the diode to be simulated using
the NIST 2010 value of 1.602176565e-19, because then the simulation would not
match the measurement.
Someone might think that they are "improving" the files by updating the
values, but they are not, and this would detract from the standard.
Further, I don't think that "disciplines.vams" is just a list of facts,
and this file is also included in the git repository:
https://github.com/upverter/ADMS/blob/master/admsXml/disciplines.vams
though it was not mentioned in the original post.
-Geoffrey
(I am not a lawyer, but I am a member of the Accellera Verilog-AMS
technical committee)
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