Re: the perennial pine licensing problem

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Peter S Galbraith wrote:

> Michael Stone wrote:
> 
> > Am I missing something, or is the current pine license
> > (http://www.washington.edu/pine/overview/legal.html) ok for non-free?
> 
> I can try to get the ball rolling.
> 
> Okay for non-free pretty much only means okay to redistribute
> modified binaries (I assume we have to modify it for Debian).
> 
> We can comply with this:
> 
>  In order to reduce confusion and facilitate debugging, we request
>  that locally modified versions be denoted by appending the letter
>  "L" to the current version number, and that the local changes be
>  enumerated in the integral release notes and associated
>  documentation.

Debian pine is not a "locally modified version", it is distributed widely
by a lot of Debian mirrors. A locally modified version is one that it is
to be installed on a single machine, or in every mail server of a given
ISP if you like, for internal use only, certainly not for redistribution.

> I'm not certain about the following:
> 
>  Redistribution of this release is permitted as follows, or by
>  mutual agreement:
>  (a) In free-of-charge or at-cost distributions by non-profit
>  concerns;
>  (b) In free-of-charge distributions by for-profit concerns;
>  (c) Inclusion in a CD-ROM collection of free-of-charge,
>  shareware, or non-proprietary software for which a fee may be
>  charged for the packaged distribution.

Here, "this release" means the one that UW distributes, i.e. without any
changes.

If they mean "Redistribution of this release, with or without changes, is
permitted ..." they should explicitly say so.

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