License issue: Verilog-AMS headers provided by Accellera

guitorri commented 8 years ago

The Verilog-AMS headers provided by Accelera (http://accellera.org/downloads/standards/v-ams) are non-free, hence incompatible with (L)GPL.

They do not allow for modification, only use and distribution. The latest copyright notice states:

// Copyright(c) 2009-2014 Accellera Systems Initiative Inc.
// 1370 Trancas Street #163, Napa, CA 94558, USA.
//
// The material in constants.vams is an essential part of the Accellera Systems
// Initiative ("Accellera") Verilog-AMS Language Standard. Verbatim copies of
// the material in this Annex may be used and distributed without restriction.
// All other uses require permission from Accellera IP Committee
// (ipr-chair@lists.accellera.org).
// All other rights reserved
//
// Version 2.4.0
//

ADMS should not have these files in the repository, and ADMS should not be distributed with these files.

There are few alternatives:

Convince Accellera to change their copyright notice to something that is (L)GPL friendly.
Implement headers from scratch, see clean room proposal.
Provide our own non-compliant header and means to fetch the non-free compliant ones from another package (from this debian-legal suggestion)

Further details from previous discussions on this subject can be found below:

felix-salfelder commented 8 years ago

@guitorri i have computed some numbers and (almost) implemented the header that bastien describes in https://github.com/Qucs/ADMS/wiki/Header-license-issue#clean-room-implementation

can you pick it from there, add #define and commit it with a (GPLv2) header?

guitorri commented 8 years ago

@MikeBrinson thank you for the reminder:

Hello Felix Writing a simple, experimental, set of headers should not be thatdifficult. It could be based on the published data in K.S. Kundert and Olaf Zinke, "The Designer's Guide to Verilog-AMS", Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston/Dordrecht/London, First Edition, June 2004,ISBN: 1-4020-8044-1. Mike

I thought about this book and was concerned about the book publisher copyright. It guess I was right on being concerned. See below screenshot from Amazon (taken on the grounds of fair use).

If I read it correctly, to just execute the pieces of code in the book one has to purchase a copy of the book? Is that right? Please someone confirm.

It seems to be a similar issue with the Numerical Recipes book (among others). The authors/publishers put restrictions that make the code they provide unusable with GPL.

guitorri commented 8 years ago

Headers have been replaced.

Qucs / ADMS

License issue: Verilog-AMS headers provided by Accellera #35