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Pine/Pico License Misconceptions
def writes "Linux Today has a good article that clarifies a lot of the misconceptions about the Pine and Pico license, and why these are not, in fact, open source programs." All things aside, I use Pine - for many of the reasons that the article points out - because I've used for as long as I can remember. Of course, CowboyNeal keeps talking about mutt but we'll see.
And yet both fall way behind in most areas, compared to mh. I just wish mh was more consistent internally. replcomps/replfilter rule, but forw doesn't behave the same way, for example. And it needs to handle MIME better...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Too many GNU advocates have forgotten what freedom is.
Freedom is the absence of restriction. There are many kinds of restrictions, but GNU and the FSF only focus on one kind. Specifically, they focus on licensing restrictions.
But there is one kind of restriction that I find particularly onerous, and one that GNU ignores. And that is a restriction on my ability to choose.
Pine's restriction against redistributing modifications is minor compared to not being able to choose to use Pine. No one is forcing me to use Pine. I do not suddenly lose my free will when I see "pine" in a list of packages to install. If I choose to use Pine, that is my personal choice and no one else's business!
I find it absurd that some people think that I can lose my freedom by having ten mail clients to choose from instead of nine.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I have far more warm feelings towards the developers who have been giving away valuable software for a decade and a half, than I do for yet another FSF developer cloning their work, urging users to switch for ideological reasons and acting like he's saving the world from pure evil.
Yup, got to agree with you on that one. I may not like all of the licensing terms of Pine, but they're a hell of a lot better than Outlook Express's! It's quite ingenuous for the author of nano to come out with an article lambasting Pine as something worse than Outlook Express. I'm sorry, but I possess free will and the ability to excercise it. I don't need some drone from GNU telling me what software I should or should not use. Even if Pine is going to warp my mind and twist my spine, it's still my choice to use it or not, not GNU's.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
And here recently, pico was ported to the version of PPC Linux that is specific to TiVo. And included on a really nice modernized TiVo boot disk (that is like Dillan's boot disk, but with a slew of utils included). Free of charge though, so I don't think UW is going to have a cow. Not that UW has REALLY gone after anyone, right?
Anyway, I'm not sure if you've ever used vi over a slow link, say 300 baud modem slow, but the unneeded screen redraws on pico tend to screw things up. Or if you're using vi on a crappy terminal that's not even VT52 compatible, it will default to a useable mode of 'ed', which is easy to use if you know vi. However, if you're using pico, you're SOL unless you can quickly learn ed. `8r) Plus, there is usually a statically linked copy of /bin/vi on most unices, hence if you have a crash, you can recover. However, pico (and joe and emacs) are all in /usr or /opt or /usr/local/, which could be corrupt. if you have /, you can get your system back up and running.
And yea, it is kind of a religious debate. I'm just going with the 'sysadmin' point of view. any developer would tell me i'm silly for not using emacs. and i'd agree with them for their job. For me, doing text editing, i find vi to be the fastest with all it's control keys. But this comes from someone to hates to even hit the right arrow for more than 5 characters. (5l to move 5 characters right).
It's the whole 'right tool for the job' thing. And many NT people believe that there is only one tool for any job, and in the subject of text editors, my experience says that 'pico' is the only one they know. only because they don't want to use the full power of vi, because they don't care, they just want something that works. I prefer something that works well. but then again, most NT admins don't have to go onto unix boxes, so pico is fine for the tasks that they need to do.
Anyway, not to get into a flame war either, this is all just coming from someone who does entirely too much unix for his own good at work.
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
I don't know if this has already been said (it seems to niot have been) but GNU Nano is a Open Source version of Pico. Google is your friend. And I find modal programs such as vi a massive kludge, though that editor certainly has many features I do like.
PINE is not really part of the problem, and attempting to villainize them is wrong in my opinion. They make a program. As a user, you can download it, you can hack the source, you can use it. You simply cannot distribute changes to the source. This is essentially the same terms as DJB software packages such as qmail, djbdns, and publicfile.
The prompting of RMS to found GNU has been reported as the failure of a printer company to either fix their driver or allow RMS to see the source to fix it himself. Ask yourself, if they had allowed him to fix the driver for himself, but had insisted that he send his changes back to them for redistribution, how bad would that world be ? (That sentence is pretty awful - I feel kinda like Dubya).
I would MUCH rather see distributions like Debian allow the distribution of binaries or source for PINE in a non-free section. There oughta be a category for software like this. The criteria are that the author provides a copy of the source that the user owns in the copyright sense, and that nothing more than standard copyrights are allowed. This is a stark contrast to EULA contractually governed packages, and should not be categorized and villainized in the same manner.
There was a time, around when PINE was written, in which the vast majority of open source programs gave you a copy in the copyright sense, and no more. This gets you MOST of the way from an EULA-type agreement to a GNU type agreement, but not all the way.
BTW, I use mutt mainly because I HATE pico. PINE never included the functionality to plugin your own editor. You have to use pico first, and then exit to your own editor. That is a bad design, and I cannot fix it for others - only U Wash can.
CowboyNeal is on the money, here. Mutt is already more advanced than Pine and is rapidly improving. I'm not surprised to hear that Pine isn't open-source, because it's development just didn't seem as fast and responsive as popular open source products usually are. For God's sake, let's get a threaded view in there, already! The problem is as Hemos demonstrates-- he doesn't want to move off Pine because "that's the way it is." C'mon Hemos, what happened to the hacker instincts? Get it learned!
As a TA for a class at GA Tech there were many reasons I encouraged students not to use pico, chief of which were
- Lack of syntax highlighting.
- Inability to save sessions, meaning all your code is lost if your X session disconnects, someone reboots teh machine you are remotely connected to (which happens a lot in colleges) or if the machine crashes.
- Extremely unscriptable. In emacs I can call up the man page for a function by pressing F4, automatically go to a specific line number by pressing F5, browse inheritance tree structures of C++ classes with Ebrowse, create my own syntax highlighting mode for C# code and more. Vi users have similar power.
There are more reasons I do not encourage novice programmers to use pico but these are the ones that stand out the most.--
it's not open source, but I know that many of our über-geeks prefer pico to any other text editor, just because of the simplicity of it.
If that isn't a sign of the Apocalypse I don't know what is...
--
Seriously. I like free (as in beer or as in speech) software... I prefer open source... but as long as I don't have to sign away my first born... I just don't care enough to not use the software.
BlackNova Traders
For people who came into the Unix world after 1997, it's easy to think it's always been this way, with constant chatter about RMS and ESR, free vs. open, license celebrities making millions from their advocacy. Especially since both the Free and Open camps retroactively drag everything going back to the Difference Engine onto their bandwagons.
But when Pine came out, the mindset was different. They made it and they gave it away under terms that they thought were reasonable. Blasting them because the Pine license "is not a Free Software license, nor does it meet the Open Source Definition" is like those self-righteous people who declare that "Abraham Lincoln was a racist."
Me -- I have far more warm feelings towards the developers who have been giving away valuable software for a decade and a half, than I do for yet another FSF developer cloning their work, urging users to switch for ideological reasons and acting like he's saving the world from pure evil.
So, people who support Open Source and Free Software are perverts for thinking you should be able to ship modified binaries of a program! The wording could have been "change" or "twist", but the word chosen was "pervert". I feel this is an intentional slander of proponents of the GPL and other Free Software licenses.
Oh, please. First, no one is calling you a "pervert". That's just childish to say. Second, the issue isn't what other licenses let you do, it's what the Pine license lets you do.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
This is the author's main gripe : that the license accompanying Pine "restricts modified redistribution" (emphasis mine). But doesn't the GPL also restrict modified redistribution? I can't redistribute GPL'ed software without making the source code available, can I ? So restriction-free redistribution cannot by itself be the sticking point for the author of the article. Why doesn't the author just face up to his ideologies and admit he just doesn't like how the UW license restricts modified redistribution, and say instead that he prefers the way the GPL restricts the same thing ?
yeah, i know a lot of uber-geeks who use pico for its simplicity, just like they use unix for its simplicity.
wtf are you talking about?
'uber-geeks' would need a decent editor with advanced functions such as vi* or emacs, for doing advanced work, whereas pico is basically 'open a file, edit it line by line manually, save file'
Why do I feel this is licenses is as bad as Microsoft's licenses? I don't, I think it's worse. With any commercial license, you do not ever expect to see or have rights over the source code to the software. In the case of Pine, users are lulled into thinking they have rights to do what they want with the software, but really they don't. And if UW makes the license more proprietary or simply stops updating it, there's nothing they can do about it.
So it's Pine's / Pico's fault that people don't understand / misuse the license? Please. I'd take this license over Microsoft's anyday, and to try to say that it's _worse_ because of _misconceptions_ destroys much of the credibility and reasonableness in the article.