Refusing to Let SPICE Die: One Engineer's Fight to Keep a Classic Circuit Simulation Tool Alive

A Call to Preserve an Open-Source Tool

A post titled "I refuse to let SPICE die" recently appeared on Hacker News, quietly drawing attention from the engineering community. Despite modest engagement (15 upvotes and 2 comments), the emotion behind the title resonated with many in the electronics engineering and open-source software worlds — a foundational tool, decades old and underpinning the entire analog circuit design industry, is at risk of being forgotten.

This kind of appeal is not uncommon. In an era of rapid software iteration, many once-essential pillars of the industry have gradually faded from view — casualties of dwindling maintainers, declining community activity, or displacement by commercial alternatives. SPICE's situation is, in many ways, a microcosm of the shared fate facing countless legacy open-source engineering tools.

What Is SPICE, and Why Does It Matter?

SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) is one of the most important circuit simulation tools in electrical engineering. Originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley, it allows engineers to simulate circuit behavior — including voltage, current, and frequency response — using mathematical models, all before a single physical component is soldered.

Put simply, nearly every modern chip and PCB design workflow involves SPICE or one of its derivatives. From commercial implementations like PSpice and HSPICE to the open-source ngspice, SPICE's technical lineage runs deep and has become the de facto standard for analog circuit design.

That's precisely why a cry of "I refuse to let SPICE die" carries weight beyond the fate of a single software project — it speaks to the preservation of an entire body of engineering knowledge and design methodology.

The Real Challenges Facing Legacy Tools

Foundational tools like SPICE tend to fall into an awkward trap: they are critical enough that everyone depends on them, yet too mature and "unglamorous" to attract new contributors or funding.

This predicament plays out in several ways:

• Aging maintainers: Many core developers have been in the field for decades, with few younger engineers stepping up to take the reins.
• Outdated documentation and codebases: Code originally written in Fortran or C presents a steep learning curve for modern developers.
• Pressure from commercial alternatives: Feature-rich, user-friendly commercial EDA tools have captured much of the market, undermining the motivation to contribute to open-source versions.
• Declining awareness: Engineers entering the field today may be more familiar with integrated modern design suites than with the underlying SPICE engine powering them.

The poster's act of "refusing" is fundamentally a form of resistance against this slow decline — an attempt, through personal effort, to reignite community interest and investment in the tool.

The Broader Question of Open-Source Infrastructure Sustainability

SPICE's predicament echoes a recurring debate in the tech world: the sustainability of open-source infrastructure. The foundations of the internet and the modern technology industry are riddled with critical projects maintained by a handful of volunteers. When those maintainers step away, entire ecosystems can be left exposed.

Whether it's cryptographic libraries, compiler toolchains, or domain-specific tools like SPICE, their value tends to go unnoticed when everything is working — and only becomes apparent when something breaks or the project nears abandonment.

How to build sustainable maintenance models for these projects — through corporate sponsorship, foundation stewardship, or community crowdfunding — remains an open question with no universal answer. The poster's actions may represent a modest but sincere attempt to answer that question through sheer personal commitment.

Closing Thoughts: Why Persisting Matters

This post is brief, and the discussion it sparked is limited — but the issues it surfaces deserve reflection from every technical practitioner: who, exactly, is responsible for maintaining the foundational tools that underpin our daily work?

For readers interested in electronics engineering or the open-source ecosystem, this kind of appeal is a reminder that technological continuity depends not only on innovation, but also on the active stewardship of what already exists. If you have any interest in SPICE or similar engineering tools, getting involved in the open-source community — contributing documentation, code, or even just awareness — may be the most direct way to ensure these industrial cornerstones don't quietly disappear.