>Number:         28829
>Category:       pkg
>Synopsis:       cad/spice uses readline but is not GPL compatible
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       low
>Responsible:    pkg-manager
>State:          open
>Class:          change-request
>Submitter-Id:   net
>Arrival-Date:   Sat Jan 01 17:09:00 +0000 2005
>Originator:     Pedro F. Giffuni
>Release:        none
>Organization:
>Environment:
FreeBSD
>Description:
Greetings! 
I was maintainer of the FreeBSD spice port and I've been peeking around for a while. I suggest you adopt some of the changes we did to the spice ports: in particular we removed readline support on the classic spice. We (I) did it mainly because it made easier the maintainance, but there are also licensing issues: GNU readline is under the GPL and SPICE has the advertisement clause which, at least in theory, makes the resulting binary restricted.
The ngspice people decided to disable it by default. On FreeBSD we enabled readline on ngspice only when we are not packaging so the binaries that we distribute don't mix GPL and BSD code.
>How-To-Repeat:

>Fix:
Of course, supporting libedit would solve any and all licensing issues, and the ngspice people would be glad to get a copy of such patches.