Re: License problems with Pine MUA?

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 02:14:31PM -0500, Drews, Jonathan* wrote:
> I don't doubt that it's not open source. I just wonder why it merits
> exclusion on some distros. I mean some distros also ship RealPlayer,
> APFL Ghostscript, Scilab, Gnuplot, Java, Acrobat reader and in some
> cases Macromedia Flash. None of those are open source.
[...]
>  I don't dispute your word Steven. I just get the suspicion that their was a
> quarrel with the Pine developers in the past and now it's being excluded
> because of that quarrel. Sort of like the problems with Qt a few years back

At the time, Red Hat was the only one who really threw a fit about Qt.
Honestly, it wasn't open-source at the time, but Red Hat was
distributing Netscape and various other non-free bits, so their
argument about Qt was disingenuous at best.  Now, Fedora Core is free
of patent-encumbered and non-open-source software, so leaving pine out
is the right thing to do.  (Leaving pine out probably doesn't annoy
nearly as many people as leaving mp3 support out does.)

The solution there is easy though...  Like Debian non-free, there are
several (unofficial and semi-official) repositories of non-free bits
for Fedora.  Obviously NetBSD has something similar, or you wouldn't
have been able to install pine at all.  :-)

I forgot to mention...  I'm not sure what state it is in, but there is
an open-source pine clone:

  http://www.courier-mta.org/cone/

Between that and nano, theoretically a person wouldn't need pine (or
pico).

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-7360             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/

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