Re: Debian vs Red Hat??? I need info.
I went through this with Terry Gray (Pine Development Team) and Santiago
Vila (Debian maintainer of the Pine source) about the time Pine 4.20
was coming out...
On Thu, 18 May 2000, Will Lowe wrote:
> > Can I ask why debian doesn't include pine? Just curious. I know Debian
>
> The license for pine doesn't allow you to redistribute "modified binaries"
> (e.g., fix a bug in the source, compile it, and redistribute the
> executable you get from this). Therefore, it can't be included as part of
> Debian -- it doesn't meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines at
> http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines. Besides which, we have
> to make patches to pine to get it to put its files in the right place,
> etc. on a Debian system, and once we make those patches, we're not allowed
> to redistribute the compiled program anyway!
...well, not without getting permission first, which was given (or
will be if requested, depending on how formal you want to be).
> Other distros that include Pine must obviously therefore compile without
> making patches, or have arranged other (special) redistribution terms with
> the University of Washington, or are simply violating the copyright.
They probably just asked permission. The sticking point with Debian
is that permission to distribute a modified binary does not apply to
the end user, `everyone does not have the same permission'.
The debian-user archive will have the results of that discussion; sorry,
I don't have my email archive handy and can't narrow the date down for
you.
So, it is not so much that Debian doesn't have permission to distribute
a modified binary package, it is that doing so would open up a whole
can'o'worms w.r.t. redistribution... so why go there and possibly cause
problems for Debian's distributors, eh.
later,
Bruce
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