pine: was: Re: JOB POSTING: Application Evangelist

[Christopher Murtagh]

On Wed, 10 Aug 2005, R P Herrold wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Aug 2005, Christopher Murtagh wrote:
>
>> have a braindead license. For example, if a distro found a security problem 
>> with Pine, they're not allowed to ship patched binarys without written 
>> permission from UofW. Instead, they have to either wait for UofW to fix it 
>> and ship their binaries, or ship source or patches. This is really not 
>> acceptable.
>
> Over the last ten years I have reported two security matters to the Pine 
> development team at UW.  In the first case, they issued an update the next 
> day, the second, in three days.
>
> It packages and builds trivially on YDL 3 and 4. Updated tarballs usually 
> drop right into an old .spec file.  Instead of speculating about possible 
> problems, you might check the true track record.

  The track record is irrelevant. Their license prevents people from doing 
the right thing and this is why many distros (including Red Hat) have 
dropped Pine.

  If I'm a distro maintainer, I don't want to *have* to wait for a third 
party developer if I found a security fix now. Why should I wait? Also, if 
the fix that I have is a feature enhancement that the UofW folks don't 
want or agree with, then I'm not allowed to ship the binaries.

Does this ring a bell:

And lo, upon Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 08:27:45PM -0500, R P Herrold spaketh thusly:
> hmmm ... maybe three years ago I stumbled on some pine settings which 
> result in headers, as follows, when various attachments are present. 
> Viruses, in-ine images, html, whatever -- all fade away;  and pgp/gpg 
> signing and confirmation 'just happens'.  Pity the UW has its panties in 
> a bunch on setting it fully free ...

Yes, I agree with you 100%. It's too bad Pine's license is braindead and 
non-free.

Cheers,

Chris