Andrea Borgia wrote: > Santiago Vila wrote: > SV>No, if Debian accepts a special permission from UW to distribute modified > SV>binaries, they will never see the need to make pine free software. > > This might be true, but I'm more interested in the opposite question: do you > seriously believe that Debian refusing Pine for that reason will actually > force UW to make it free? Pardon me if I don't hold my breath waiting for > that to happen ;-)
Well, I'm really not interested in the opposite question ;-) I seriously believe that Debian should follow pine license strictly and not accept any special permission "only for Debian". This is written in the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and I believe it's a guideline we should follow for non-free software as well. Debian is about free software, non-free software should not be treated *more* favourably than free software in the Debian archives. Consider this as a matter of principles, if you like. I think Debian should only distribute whatever everybody would be allowed to distribute by just reading the license. > Fine, then ship an unmodified version. Just run configure with the > appropriate values, pack the resulting binary and we should all be set. An "unmodified pine" on a Debian system? No, thanks, I don't want to see configuration files in /usr/local/lib. It seems to me that you have not even tried to compile the Debian version of pine, have you? Please "apt-get source pine" and compile it yourself. If you look at the size of the .diff maybe you will realize why shipping an unmodified pine would be a very bad idea.
