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Unfortunately, the author of Pine doesn't like a lot of patchs. He repeatedly refused SSL patches produced by others in favor of maintaining the intrenally published and not-to-be-published local version, he rejects the use of Maildir, and he insists that every file in the home directory of the associated uw-imapd IMAP server is a mail file, and rejects patches to store them in a local subdirectory instead. This caused endless problems with Netscape andn other IMAP clients running on the same machine as the mail server itself, as it recursed endlessly. And as near as I could tell, he kept deliberately re-writing the 10 lines or so of patchable code to *BREAK* published patches.

Coupled with the stapled on "we didn't mean it was OK to modify it and republish it, even though that's what the language said" as described at http://www.asty.org/articles/20010702pine.html, there's no reason to continue any support whatsoever of Pine.

Similar things happened with Pine, which has similarly restrictive licensing. But Sun doesn't even publish source, which makes it even harder to deal with legally.

Those inanities are discussed in good depth at http://www.asty.org/articles/20010702pine.html. I highly recommend it as a good discussion of how bad licensing of "free" software can actually prevent it from being "open" and deliberately hinder people who want to work with it. Sun's licensing is similarly restrictive, with that caveat that Sun doesn't develop source code for Java. Washington University at least publishes their source code, even if you're not allowed to publish modifications of it under any circumstances.

The guy who wrote this is full of shit, and he's also the author if nano, a pico competitor. PINE/PICO were developed by the University of Washington, the chances of the UW implementing the kind of restrictive licensing that he refers to are slim to none. It's pure FUD, only this time from someone in the OSS community.

The thing wrong with pico is it isn't free, hence why distros like Centos and Whitebox include its free clone, nano. http://www.asty.org/articles/20010702pine.html has a decent article detailing pine's default text editor, pico's licensing scheme and why it's bad, and goes on to explain why nano is a suitable replacement.

A little program called cmatrix. If I really want to impress people, I open about six transluscent aterms with green text side by side on my 1600x1200 display, have a few of them run cmatrix, and reorganize my pr0n collection on the other few, since not many people who'd be impressed by such a trick can actually read text that small.

If they aren't impressed ("You're a nerd"), I switch to another virtual desktop, and launch all my games -- all at once. Half-Life, Starcraft, ut2004, q3a, quakeforge, tuxracer, doom3, and whatever else I can get to not grab my mouse. Then I go back to the one with the aterms and hook them all into the server consoles for the games, and start messing with things like sv_gravity, god, etc.

If they still aren't impressed, I might up the ante and play a pr0n movie for them on half my screen, and go play q3a with extra gibs on the other half. And if that doesn't get them (maybe the bloody explosions and the pr0n don't mix well), I give them goatse until they go away.

It's not that pine is not GPL, it's that pine is altogether Not Free Software. Specifically, the University of Washington will not allow anyone to distribute modified versions, they've even threatened to sue people who do this with older versions of Pine. This makes it hard to work the software into a distribution like Red Hat, and even harder to want to.

Personally, I use Mutt, and I love it. Other people seem equally pleased with elm. With both of these clients, "all you need is an xterm".

If you really prefer Pine, there are two projects to create an Free replacement for it: Hydrant and OSERP. I don't know how far along and usable either project is. If you just miss Pico, there's an excellent Free clone called Nano, which is very usable and included in most Linux distros already.

cmatrix has a vga font supplied with it,
aalib shouldn't have any problems with it, as long as you feed it properly. (cmatrix is nice standalone, anyway :)

BlackBox is highly configurable, too. I was bored one day filling in at one of our data centers and decided to switch the Ops workstation to use BlackBox. One thing I wish KDE could do is run a program like CMatrix in the root window... :-)

-B

You can have a project that gets tons of hits yet no one seems to actually want to maintain. Case in point, what has to be one of the most pointless pieces of eye candy ever created, CMatrix. Gets lots of downloads, mind you, but I posted (one year to the day as a matter of fact, what kind of coincidence is that) about needing a new maintainer. There have been about three volunteers since then, none of the applicants really mentioned having any experience in programming in curses (the toolkit used), let alone managing a project written in it.

Basically what it comes down to is most people (even GNU/Linux users) want to download and run the program, MAYBE poke at the code a little. But take over actual maintainership (even if it's next no no actual work), fugedabouit!