Pine in Hoary

[sparkes]

Eric Dunbar wrote:

> Alas, it is this attitude that gives OSS a bad name. All OSS users, or
> developers are not fundamentalists. I suspect only a tiny minority
> actually care whether or not something is "free" according to your
> definition (or that of a particular demigogue). 

When you are using an operating system (any operating system) you play 
by the rules the developers choose.

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ubuntu/licensing

"Must not contaminate other software licences."

Pine clearly places restrictions on the other software that may be 
distributed with it and this is non-free.

pine is considered 'open source' by the Universtiy but is not considered 
free software because of the comtaminations of other licences.  You 
can't even legally recompile and redistribute the binaries as once thought.

http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/legal.html#10.1

you can't go calling people free software zealots (or words to that 
effect) because they respect the licence o the developers.  If you think 
Ubuntu should ship pine against the wishes of the authors you might was 
well ship vmware and a cracked key, plus doom3 as well because you are 
advocating piracy.  Other distributions that ship pine might have 
'written permission' to do so for ubuntu to get such a licence and be at 
the whim of the university of washington for ever would be a potential 
legal nightmare.

if you want to use a pine workalike you can invoke mutt like this

/usr/bin/mutt -F /usr/share/doc/mutt/examples/Pine.rc

a script running this command can be placed in your /usr/local/bin 
directory as pine and everytime to enter the command pine you run mutt 
pretending to be pine.  or alternatively you can download and compile 
pine yourself.  the source to pine used to be included in debian (and 
may still be) but not distributed as a binary (thus not contaminating 
other licences) but it does not seem to be in ubuntu.

sparkes