Package requests wishlist - pine

[Per Bjornsson]

On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 11:06, Rex Dieter wrote:

> OTOH, I guess it all boils down to fedora.redhat.com's definition of 
> "open source", as referred to in point 2 on:
> http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html
> If pine's license doesn't meet this definition, then I would have to 
> concede that pine has no place in in Fedora.

See, that's exactly the point. The Open Source Definition from OSI (see
specifically point 3 about derived works) - as far as I know pretty much
the authoritative source on this issue:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

Pine license: http://www.washington.edu/pine/overview/legal.html
Pine legal FAQ (for clarifications):
http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/legal.html

In summary: You're allowed to make modifications to the source and
deploy binaries _locally_. You may distribute source patches to Pine,
but not a pre-patched source distribution or a binary package. This is
in direct contradiction of the "derived works" clause in the Open Source
Definition. Also, it rules out distribution of RPMs that are fixed up to
integrate nicely in a Fedora system, so it is a direct problem for
making a useful package.

Of course, in a repo that is not constrained by the Fedora distro rules,
it would be possible to distribute a .nosrc rpm, or possibly even a
.src.rpm including useful integration patches - with the latter you're
still distributing an unchanged tarball plus patches. For people hooked
on Pine this might be a sane solution. Evolution + webmail access when I
don't have IMAP access has quite effectively weaned me off Pine.

Cheers,
Per

-- 
Per Bjornsson <perbj at stanford.edu>
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University