Re: installing pine
On Thu, 21 Dec 2000, Bruce Sass wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Dec 2000, Noah L. Meyerhans wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 19, 2000 at 03:12:08PM -0800, Adam Shand wrote:
> > > pine, pico and pilot deb's are included in woody. you'll notice that the
> > > version numbers have an 'L' at the end of them. that signifies (i
> > > believe) that they are not an unmodified binary and allows debian to
> > > distribute the pine binaries that they want to and still comply with the
> > > license.
> >
> > Actually is just the opposite. The pine license has always allows
> > redistribution of unmodified binaries. The 'L' version number suffix is
> > not needed. However, because of Debian's file system standards we
> > needed to make changes to Pine. Adding the 'L' suffix to the version
> > number indicates that it is a modified binary (I believe 'L' is for
> > Locally modified or something). I'm not sure if the 'L' license clause
> > is something new or if nobody bothered to read the whole license in the
> > past before labelling it as unsuitable for inclusion.
>
> I delved into this about the time Pine 4.0 was released...
> Debian believes it would need permission from the Pine Development Team
> to redistribute modified binaries, getting permission means that
> Debian has rights that others do not - which makes it non-free.
Real freedom includes freedom to fork the code. Unless the Pine license
allows this, it's not really free.
Dwight
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