[buug] TonStanco is at it again...

[Rick Moen]

Following up on my own post:

> You use Pine.  It's not open source, either (not since 
> v 3.91 -- modified binaries may not be distributed).  
> Check the licence, if you weren't aware of that:
> http://www.washington.edu/pine/overview/legal.html  It's fairly benign,
> but not open source. 

Not quite right.

The licence to pine did become more restrictive starting with 3.92 --
but, more important, the public position of copyright holder University
of Washington on interpretation of its _old_ license has also changed,
dramatically.  The old licence stated:  " Permission to use, copy,
modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any
purpose and without fee to the University of Washington is hereby
granted...."

In recent years, U. of W. has alleged that the words "permission to
copy, distribute and modify" do not grant permission to distribute a
modified version.  In other words, they say you can distribute the
software, and you can modify the software, but you can't modify it and
then distribute the result.  U. of W. _threatened to sue_ FSF for
distributing modified binaries.

The MANA Project (http://www.kvaleberg.com/mana.html) now distributes a
modern, GPLed derivative of Pine 3.91.  However, "Mana" remains under
the shadow of U. of W.'s licence interpretation.

Emulating pine using the GPLed "mutt" MUA:  Put the following 
script in /usr/local/bin as "pine", and chmod it to 755 (executable):

   #!/bin/sh
   /usr/bin/mutt -F /usr/doc/mutt/examples/Pine.rc

-- 
Cheers,                   "Teach a man to make fire, and he will be warm 
Rick Moen                 for a day.  Set a man on fire, and he will be warm
rick at linuxmafia.com       for the rest of his life."   -- John A. Hrastar