Joel Koltner wrote:
"Chuck Harris" wrote in message
...
I have, and I think it is a very nice tool. Perhaps the best of the
available spices. But because it is not a free tool (eg. open source)
I have to live with everything just the way that Mike Englehart
wants it to be.

He's certainly open to input from users, Chuck -- it's part of his job.

Mike is all aces as far as I am concerned. His level of responsiveness is
very close to as good as what I typically get from open source authors.

No
guarantees he'd add something you'd want, of course, but in my opinion Mike is
going to be a lot more responsive to the average user than, say, Synopysys
would be if you asked them to add something to HSPICE.

Agreed.

I have for many years seen a connection between software's price and
the responsiveness of the company towards the customer:

Synopsys charges a boat load, and they are not very responsive.
LT charges nothing for LTSPice, and is so responsive that I
would not be at all surprised if Mike Englehardt jumps into this thread.

That isn't a bad thing, but it is very limiting because
one day Mike won't be there to support LTSpice anymore, and LT will
decide that they haven't the funds to hire some new support, and it
will freeze.

That's a rather pessimistic viewpoint.

No, it isn't! It is a realistic viewpoint. I have been in this
industry long enough (37+ years) to have seen this happen over and
over again. It *will* happen with every single piece of commercial
software ever written at some point... guaranteed, unless the owner
decides to commit it to the public domain, or open source, like
MARTHA's owner so generously did.

Worst case, LTSpice simply isn't
developed any more, but it'll then always still be just as good as it is the
day that happens.

It sure will, and just like good old DOS Orcad, you will have some people
who keep around old legacy DOS systems just so they can use it. I have rather
a lot of software that was written for Windows 95, that is no longer usable
with NT, XP, or Vista. Am I supposed to keep a '95 box around just to run it?

With open source, I just relink to the latest library, and I am back in the
game.

And what if I need to change it? I won't be able to make LTSpice do
anything that it cannot currently do. That is bound to be a problem if
I need to simulate flux-gate capacitors. Or want a better matrix solving
algorithm than Mike knew to choose.

To cease being supported is to die in software land.

Everyone and everything dies at some point...

The only way open source software can die is if it gets lost so badly
that nobody can find it. This is unlikely, given the wide distribution
that most of these packages have had.

MARTHA's source is open, and because anyone with the desire to
support it can, it will live forever.

Oh, come on... open-source software is, if anything, more likely to die than
most commercial software because there's usually no profit motive behind
keeping it alive.

MARTHA has already outlived most any other commercial software that
was written in the same time frame. As long as the source code doesn't
get lost, and *anyone* is interested in it, it will continue to survive.

I have been running a quaint little editor that Jonathan Payne, of Sun
JAVA fame wrote when he was a wet behind the ears kid in high-school.
It was designed to run under unix on a pdp-11 with 64K-I, and 64K-D.
I have ported(or simply used) it to(on) every operating system, and
platform that I have used since he wrote it.

Before jove, I was enamored by a nice little editor called edix. It was
proprietary, and ran only under DOS. It died 25 years ago. Sure, I can
cart its mangy carcass off to linux and run it under DOSEMU, but if I want
to change anything about it I am out of luck.

You say there is no profit motive, but that is where you are completely
wrong. *I* profit from the open source software that I use. As long as
that is true, I will see to it that the software I use is available on
the systems that I am currently using.

I realize that it's not quite the same in that open-source
software, even if "dead," can be "resurrected" at any time whereas that's
often not the case with commercial software... but there's plenty of
open-source software that's been "buried" for so long now the chance of anyone
resurrecting it rather than just coming up with a new "baby" from scratch is
remote.

Odds are pretty good that that new "baby" will have in some way benefited from the
program that came before it. You might not be able to see the connection, but
it is very often there.

-Chuck