Dale Scheetz wrote: > The copyright is quite clear. You can not distribute this package for a > fee without first getting permission from the pine developers. According > to our policy this requires it go into non-free.
Now I noticed that the copyright has changed, the new one (same in version 3.94 and 3.95; the new Red Hat beta contains 3.95) looks better to me. It says: | Redistribution of this release is permitted as follows, or by mutual | agreement: [...] | (c) Inclusion in a CD-ROM collection of free-of-charge, shareware, or | non-proprietary software for which a fee may be charged for the | packaged distribution. Isn't this good enough? It sounds clear to me, but then I'm not a lawyer... If not - have you tried to ask them for individual permission similar to that in the procmail package? Here is it: | The copyright statement below is addended for the Debian system: | This program may be sold as a component of the Debian Linux | distribution or a Linux distribution derived from the Debian | Linux distribution. If it is distributed in binary form, the | source code must be included in the distribution as well. | End of addendum. (procmail would be non-free without this - the original copyright says that it may not be sold). > The older version has some substantial bugs that have been fixed in later > releases. It is my understanding that we do not distribute buggy software I see. The fix is available - but is non-free. I can see that you may not like to do the extra work of maintaining two versions of the same package, but perhaps we can just say that the older version is completely unsupported? I hope someone still has a copy of the old package, which could be put in contrib. Buggy software might sometimes be better than no software at all... I rarely use pine myself (usually only when I have to read some MIME-encrypted mail :-), but I know it's quite popular. It would be a pity if we can't ship a MIME-aware mailer with the standard distribution. Marek
