Package requests wishlist - pine

[Peter Jones]

On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 14:00 -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:

> I don't care what opensource.org's definition is.  Well, OK,  I *do* 
> care, but that's not the point I was trying to make.
> 
> The point I wanted to make is this:  What is *redhat/fedora*'s 
> definition of Open Source?  I have yet to see any authoritative 
> reference.  Until I see one, I would argue that there exists enough 
> ambiguity to include pine.  For example, UW's site claims pine is 
> opensource.

It doesn't matter which licenses are or aren't "open source".  If the
license says we can't ship a binary built from pre-patched sources, then
we're doing a spectacular disservice to ship the software at all.

A couple of hypothetical, but very realistic, examples:

If there's a security problem, what would we tell the users?  "Remove
the package until there's a fixed one, which oh by the way we don't have
any clue as to an ETA for"?

If we need to patch it to do mailbox locking the One True Fedora Way,
what do we do?  We can't fix it, and so it'll be the one mail client
that corrupts mailboxes.  Users love corrupted mailboxes.

There are many more examples like those.

I'd say the possibility of any of these scenarios puts any package with
this kind of license well past "unmaintainable".  This is the situation
pine's license puts us in, if UW calls it "open source" or not.  The
text of the license is what matters.

So no, it's not at all reasonable to add it to Fedora Core or even
Fedora Extras.  Putting a package in either _does_ imply a degree of
maintenance responsibility on the part of the packager, or at least on
the part of Fedora, and with these outstanding concerns it is impossible
to fulfill that responsibility.

-- 
        Peter

"Don't everyone thank me at once!"
                -- Solo