IBIS 3.0 and legal questions

Hello All:

     I concur with Jon, at least as far as vendors publishing
model which are labled IBIS 3.0. Specifically, the IBIS forum should
strongly discourage model vendors from publishing .ibs files with
"3.0" as the parameter to the [IBIS Ver] keyword, at least until the
spec has gone thru the ballot process (and ideally until the parser is
developed). My fear is the same as Jon's -- a model with 3.0 syntax will
almost certainly NOT be a correct IBIS 3.0 model. If someone wants to publish
a model with 3.0 features, then I would suggest that they either leave
the [IBIS Ver] blank, or put in something like PRELIMINARY or EXPERIMENTAL,
or give the file something other than an .ibs extension.

Comments, or course, are welcome, and (if you absolutly, positivly must)
you can correct my spelling :)

                    Regards,
                    Stephen Peters
                    Intel Corp.

>on Fri, 08 Aug 1997 10:41:24 Jon Powell wrote:

Hello All,

I sent this note out last week but evidently it didn't get out over the
reflector. I hoped to at least spark some controversy.

This is my feelings on IBIS 3.0 and releasing models in this format.

The copyright for the name IBIS is owned by EIA. Until 3.0 is approved
by that body, IBIS 3.0 does not exist. If anyone publishes models
claiming to be IBIS 3.0 then they are in violation of that copyright and
EIA will probably be forced to take action.

Besides the legal implications, anyone publishing IBIS 3.0 models before
the official approval is almost certainly to be publishing models which
will NOT be correct. We had to change things to do 2.1 and we will
probably have to change things for 3.0. I will certainly not be putting
any "IBIS OFFICIAL 3.0" models into any of the IBIS data areas until
this specification is approved. I feel very strongly about this. I do
not want what happened to EDIF to happen to IBIS. If you recal, EDIF
(the earlier versions) was almost unusable because everyone had their
own dialect of the "standard" and it was virtually impossible to support
every dialect. At the same time, everyone claim to support EDIF.

Perhaps we need some PRELIMINARY or EXPERIMENTAL designation for these
new models but we should NOT call them IBIS 3.0.

comments, of course, are solicited.
(but don't correct my spelling).

Jon Powell
Senior Scientist, Viewlogic Consulting Services.
IBIS Librarian

 
Received on Fri Aug 8 13:55:39 1997