On Thu, 21 Dec 2000, Bruce Sass wrote: > On Thu, 21 Dec 2000, Noah L. Meyerhans wrote: > > On Tue, Dec 19, 2000 at 03:12:08PM -0800, Adam Shand wrote: > > > pine, pico and pilot deb's are included in woody. you'll notice that the > > > version numbers have an 'L' at the end of them. that signifies (i > > > believe) that they are not an unmodified binary and allows debian to > > > distribute the pine binaries that they want to and still comply with the > > > license. > > > > Actually is just the opposite. The pine license has always allows > > redistribution of unmodified binaries. The 'L' version number suffix is > > not needed. However, because of Debian's file system standards we > > needed to make changes to Pine. Adding the 'L' suffix to the version > > number indicates that it is a modified binary (I believe 'L' is for > > Locally modified or something). I'm not sure if the 'L' license clause > > is something new or if nobody bothered to read the whole license in the > > past before labelling it as unsuitable for inclusion. > > I delved into this about the time Pine 4.0 was released... > Debian believes it would need permission from the Pine Development Team > to redistribute modified binaries, getting permission means that > Debian has rights that others do not - which makes it non-free.
Real freedom includes freedom to fork the code. Unless the Pine license allows this, it's not really free. Dwight
