[ydl-gen] Re: pine: was: Re: JOB POSTING: Application Evangelist

[Eric Dunbar]

>   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:

At the risk of inflaming the religious sensitivities of the devout
open source-only bigots (I don't pull punches on this topic, do I ;-):

I suspect that the UW team's track record is significantly better than
that of the typical equal quality GNU project. Plus, the anecdotal
comments on this list suggest that reality is very different from the
Microsoft-schooled FUD GNU open source advocates (I am NOT targeting
this at you Chris, merely at all the FUDers that I've seen post on the
"merits" of GNU vs other OSS)!

Pine is hands down the most user friendly CLUI mailer available to
people. I first was introduced to it in 1993 and STILL today I see it
in use (and I use it on my server). It's a functional piece of
software that has yet to have been replicated under the GNU licence.

Anyway, that's my match and ten litres of jet fuel on this topic.

Eric.