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Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

I love LTSpice. Its UI has quirks, but it's really been a joy to use.

One gripe I have with the team that built it: it's typically a tool that would immensely benefit from being Open-Sourced.

It would also benefit the company that owns it.

But, it's yet another case the traditional HW guys mentality, a world where everything is IP, everything is secret by default, even when it doesn't earn you a dime.

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The most popular FOSS spice simulator is NGSpice: http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/

None of these tools have changed much since the 90's - just like the EDA industry in general

Also see Qucs-S, which is a GUI for ngspice and a few other engines.

https://ra3xdh.github.io/

Oo that looks nice! Qucs had a surprisingly great GUI - you wouldn't believe it was an EDA tool!

There is an interesting 6-part LTSpice overview/training on YouTube by none other than the creator of LTSpice itself (Mike Engelhardt) and at the very start he mentions why he thinks that the best simulators are written by the concerns that need them (e.g. Linear Technology at the time, Analog Devices now) as opposed to software companies. See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6gKThjZIj-s.

> the best simulators are written by the concerns that need them

I agree 100% with that statement.

But that statement is also 100% orthogonal to mine (Analog should OpenSource LTSpice: both they and LTSpice users would benefit immensely from doing that)

But it's a hardware company, this is an argument they are culturally incapable of understanding: the whole OpenSource thing is just alien to their way of thinking.

NGspice is open source. IMHO the only improvents in it are new models and some bug fixes. However, the program itself became worse by stripping the help part and by making nutmeg a part of the main program.

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