On Mon, 20 Apr 1998, George Bonser wrote: > > No, I think someone is taking the politics of free software to an extreme. > It looks like someone in Debian decided that their patches to configure it > resulted in a "derivative work" and since pine does not allow derivative > works to be called pine, it looks like it got yanked. >
That can't be right. One, because it could still go in non-free, only with a different name. Debian doesn't yank stuff from non-free unless it's illegal to have on the ftp server (in which case it has to be yanked, no matter what our politics). Two, because I just downloaded it. See: http://cgi.debian.org/www-master/debian.org/Packages/stable/non-free/pine.html It may well be gone from frozen, I don't know, but that could be due to bugs not licensing, or the lack of a maintainer. > Mutt is, at best, a very weak replacement for Pine. As for text email > clients, Pine has no equal and is "free enough" for most uses. If Debian > is going to start producing a crappy distribution just because it is free, > I will pay for one that is not. > The whole purpose of Debian is to be free, that's more or less the charter of the organization, to the extent that it has one. If it's ever impossible to produce a good free distribution Debian will be discontinued, and you'll not only be able to pay for a good one, you'll have to. Assuming there is one. > I do not use Debian because it is free, I use Debian because it has been > good. If emphasis is going to be on free rather than good, you are making > a mistake. > The vision is that the two coincide, and when they don't, they should be made to. In this case, by improving mutt or vm or any of the other zillion mail programs. But until then there's the non-free directory, which includes any non-free programs that are legal to distribute and have maintainers. Freeness is the original purpose of Debian, and by long consensus there is a commitment to that. It's quite simple to start your own dist with the Debian non-free and main directories combined, plus the other stuff of your choice. But there's no point beating your head on a brick wall to change Debian. > I have needed to get that off my chest ever since I noticed pine missing. > Pine is not an optional compinent for me, it is MANDITORY. There is > nothing in the distribution that comes close to replacing it. > Relax, I think it's still there. Havoc Pennington http://pobox.com/~hp -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
