Package requests wishlist - pine

[Steven Pritchard]

On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 09:09:19AM -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
> Perhaps another policy should be added to the Fedora Objectives at the 
> end about what it won't do:
> *  If enough people (especially those on the fedora-devel mailing list) 
> "just don't like" the package in question, it won't be allowed in Fedora 
> Core/Extras.
> (I'm joking, of course, but only a little).

I think the only reason why pine keeps coming up on this list is
because so many people *do* like it.

May I suggest two useful courses of action (instead of just badgering
everyone on this list)?

  1) Ask UW nicely to change the license of pine to something more
     reasonable.  They chose the pine license *years* ago before it
     was clear what that license would mean in the grand scheme of
     things.  Perhaps the powers that be could be persuaded to switch
     to another license (GPL, something BSD-ish, whatever).  (It could
     happen.  Berkeley dropped the advertising clause eventually.)

  2) Ask Warren (or whoever needs to be convinced at fedora.us) to set
     up a "non-free" repository for packages like pine, qmail, etc.
     that have source available but aren't quite OSI-compliant.  That
     would make these programs, properly patched, readily available to
     fedora.us users without worrying about licensing issues.

Personally, I think (1) is the Right Thing To Do, but, while it might
work for UW, I *seriously* doubt anyone is going to get djb to change
his license.  :-)

Steve
-- 
Steven Pritchard - K&S Pritchard Enterprises, Inc.
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