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Re: Pine 4.00 termcap(Pine in Debian?)



On Thu, 9 Jul 1998, Mark Mealman wrote:

> On Thu, 09 Jul 1998, Tim Buller wrote:
> >I'm trying to compile Pine 4.00 on a hamm/i386 system, and it wants to
> 
> Is there any truth to the rumor that Debian's dist won't include pine
> because of some restrictions in the license put out by Washington
> state?

pine is distributed in hamm as two packages, the pristine original
source code in pine-src and the debian patches in pine-diff. see below
for the reason for this unusual distribution method.

install them both with dpkg or dselect and follow the instructions to
build your own pine, pico, and pilot packages. it takes about 10 minutes
to compile on a reasonably fast machine. compiling it takes only two
simple commands...one to extract the sources, and the second to build
the packages. very easy.

> Washington's license doesn't seem any more restrictive

pine's license is a lot more restrictive than most free software
licenses. it does not allow distribution of modified binaries, therefore
debian is not legally permitted to distribute a pre-compiled pine.

> than other public domain licenses.

pine isn't public domain. most free software isn't public domain. the
term "public domain" has a very specific meaning - i.e. that the work
has no copyright.

a very small percentage of free software is actually public domain,
while most Free Software is copyright with a license (e.g. GPL, BSD,
Artistic license) allowing use, modification, and distribution.


craig

--
craig sanders


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