Re: Updating CIDER's Research Software Agreement License For Use in Ngspice

Hey Francesco,

Looking at Ngspice's upstream source code shows that only the Ngspice's User Manual (and documentation) falls under the "SPICEDOC" license. Curt may be able to assist with changing its license as well, otherwise Debian could distribute it separately from Ngspice itself. I am not sure what specific project caused Ngspice to inherit this documentation license.

It seems the animation and differentiation routines for xgraph written by Paul Walker at UIUC is licensed with the ownership of modifications restriction and non-commercial clause. For this piece of Ngspice we would need to contact UIUC.

As for the unspecified works, I'm not sure what should be done, maybe the FSF could advise.

For now, I believe we should focus on changing CIDER1b1's license since it is a low hanging fruit and is very critical to Ngspice's simulations, then we can move on to the rest.

How should Curt go about making CIDER1b1's license change?

Best regards,

Eric Kuzmenko

On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 3:26 PM Francesco Poli <invernomuto@paranoici.org> wrote:

On Fri, 21 Oct 2016 04:45:53 +0000 Eric Kuzmenko wrote:

[...]
> It was therefore not free software and did not
> comply with the Debian Free Software Guidelines, hence why it is found in
> Debian's non-free archive.

First of all, thanks for trying to liberate an important software
package for circuit simulation!
It would be really awesome, if ngspice could become Free Software.

However, please note that CIDER is apparently not the only non-free
part of the "ngspice" Debian package [1]. According to the
debian/copyright file [2] of version 26-1.1, there are other parts that
do not comply with the DFSG.

Namely, the parts under

* the NOOVELA license (non-commercial use only, lack of permission
to copy, distribute and modify)

* no license ("No license found, only copyright")

* the SPICEDOC license (educational, research and non-profit purposes
only)

Then there's the CIDER_LICENSE issue which you are trying to address.

My own personal opinion [3] is that all these issues have to be solved,
before the "ngspice" Debian package can be moved to the Debian main
archive.

I hope this may be done...
Bye.

[1] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ngspice
[2] http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/non-free/n/ngspice/ngspice_26-1.1_copyright
[3] I am not a member of the Debian Project, I am just an external
contributor: I don't officially speak on behalf of the Debian Project,
I just express my own personal opinion

--
http://www.inventati.org/frx/
There's not a second to spare! To the laboratory!
..................................................... Francesco Poli .
GnuPG key fpr == CA01 1147 9CD2 EFDF FB82 3925 3E1C 27E1 1F69 BFFE