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Re: pine in other distributions?



On Tue, 28 Sep 1999, Nick Moffitt wrote:

> Quoting Piotr Roszatycki:
> > BTW, other pine's version is a part of official RedHat distribution,
> > but I don't know is it legal?
> > 
> > Will the pine return back to distribution?
> > Well, this is the mostly used mailer by my users (and me).
> 
>         From http://linuxmafia.com/debian/tips (and based on some
> suggestions by yours truly):
> 
> 
> pine/pico:
> 
> Debian does not by default install "non-free" packages -- those under
> restrictive software licences (although many are provided and
> available for installation).  If you are a user of the "pine" e-mail
> client or the "pico" text editor that pine provides, please be aware
> that pine is non-free and therefore is not a default installation
> item.  
> 
> The U. of Washington's licence forbids distribution of pine/pico in
> binary form.  This restriction is routinely violated by many GNU/Linux
> distributions, but not by Debian.  (U. of Washington is aware of this
> licencing problem, but elects not to fix it.)  You can thus install
> pine and pico (in Debian) by installing the pine source-code package
> and then compiling the programs.

This is incorrect.

I quote:

Pine and Pico are registered trademarks of the University of Washington.
No commercial use of these trademarks may be made without prior written
permission of the University of Washington. 

Pine, Pico, and Pilot software and its included text are Copyright
1989-1999 by the University of Washington. 

Use of Pine/Pico/Pilot: You may compile and execute these programs for any
purpose, including commercial, without paying anything to the University
of Washington, provided that the legal notices are maintained intact
and honored. 

Local modification of this release is permitted as follows, or by mutual
agreement: 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.

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.

Redistribution of binary versions is further constrained by license
agreements for incorporated libraries from third parties, e.g. LDAP,
GSSAPI. 

The University of Washington encourages unrestricted distribution of
individual patches to the Pine system. By "patches" we mean "difference"
files that can be applied to the University of Washington Pine source
distribution in order to accomplish bug fixes, minor enhancements, or
adaptation to new operating systems. Submission of these patches to
University of Washington for possible inclusion in future Pine versions is
also encouraged.

[legal blurp with disclaimers concerning functionality stripped]

End of Quote


Thus we are free to distribute even a patched Pine, as long as we apply an
L at the end of the version#. Not too big a sacrifice, huh? We'll still
have to keep it in the non-free area, of course, as it's a BSD-style
license, but...

I'd love to see Pine 4.10 (in a Debian-modified state that has the pretty
colours patch + a fix for the VERY annoying bug that removes backslashes
from signatures)


/David Weinehall
  _                                                                 _ 
 // David Weinehall <tao@acc.umu.se> /> Northern lights wander      \\
//  Project MCA Linux hacker        //  Dance across the winter sky // 
\>  http://www.acc.umu.se/~tao/    </   Full colour fire           </ 


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