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.

Comments

Sysadmin point of view.

[GoNINzo]

Just to prefix this, i'm a bitter sysadmin who's had to deal with crappy computers running into all sorts of problems. My main reason for vi is because I can always expect it to be there. And you can't normally expect to install a program on all 300 machines of a production heterogenus environment and not have someone squawk.

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

GNU Nano = Open Source Pico

[Nailer]

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.

Mutt

[Axiom]

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!

A little perspective

[update()]

This reminds me a bit of the arguing about Qt licensing. To put in perspective:

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.

Licenses...

[Violet Null]

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.