Hi, On Mon, 20 Mar 2006, Pascal Bleser wrote:
On IRC, Benjamin Weber pointed me to some odd situation about the "pico" and "pine" packages. They're part of the SUSE Linux OSS distribution but their license is not even near something OSI approved (not even to mention FSF).
Quoting Benjamin: "it doesn't allow redistribution of modified versions, and redistribution of the unmodified versions is only for inclusion in non-profit things or by prior inclusion".
Also read: http://www.nano-editor.org/dist/v1.2/faq.html#6.2 http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-07-02-025-21-OP-CY-DB&tbovrmode=1
Comparing that to the OSI open source definition: "The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software." Also violates this one: "The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software." And that one: "The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources."
How about dropping them from the distribution ? pico can be replaced by GNU nano (that is already included in the distribution btw), and pine.. well... anyone still use pine ? (hint: use mutt ;))
What do you think ?
I am using elm if possible, pine else. Dropping the latter too would in no means lead me to mutt. So if destroying is the main goal, struggle on. Cheers -e -- Eberhard Moenkeberg (emoenke@gwdg.de, em@kki.org)