Bug#888489: ITP: ngspice-dfsg -- Spice circuit simulator - DFSG compatible parts
Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Carsten Schoenert <c.schoenert@t-online.de>
* Package name : ngspice-dfsg
Version : 27
Upstream Author : various (mainly Holger Vogt, Paolo Nenzi, Robert
Larice)
* URL : http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/
* License : BSD-3-clause, LGPL-2(+), GPL-2(+)
Programming Lang: C, TclTk, plain text
Description : Spice circuit simulator - DFSG compatible parts
Packages for NGspice are available due license incompatibilities in old
versions to the DFSG only in non-free.
With version 27 (released in September 2017) most of the used non DFSG
compatible licensed files/folders have been moved over to BSD 3-clause
(upstream uses here the name 'New BSD') and by this the build-able files
and binary stuff can now be considered as free enough by the DFSG.
There are still parts that uses licenses that aren't compatible with the
DFSG. All those parts can be excluded and the binaries are built without
support of that software parts. NGspice upstream has updated their
online available FAQ [2] about the used licenses, please look at point 1.5.
I prepared a wiki site to collect and track the status for files and
folders in question [3].
My working tree can be found on GitHub [4] for now. I'd really happy if
someone can have a look at this especially for the license issues which
the new version shouldn't have any longer. I had some nice communication
with upstream which gave me some guidance for the needed removal of
still not free enough licensed files and folders, which would bring in
some packages could still only served by non-free. I will probably also
maintain the src:ngspice package later as there are otherwise some
overlapping files between both source packages. I'm in contact to the
current Uploader Gudjon I. Gudjonsson about this.
I will maintain this package in the pkg-electronics-team, co-maintainers are
welcome! It's a build dependency for KiCad 5 which come with schematic
simulation based on the libngspice library which isn't available in the
non-free packages.
[1] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ngspice
[2] http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/faq.html
[3] https://wiki.debian.org/KiCad/ngspice
[4] https://github.com/tijuca/ngspice-dfsg
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