Pine (e-mail client)

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Pine

Pine 4.64's main menu
Developer University of Washington
Latest release 4.64 / September 28, 2005
OS Unix, Windows
Genre E-mail client
License Freeware
Website washington.edu/pine

Pine is a freeware text-based e-mail client developed at the University of Washington.

Contents

There are both Unix and Windows versions of Pine. The Unix version is text user interface based—its message editor inspired the text editor Pico. The Windows (and formerly DOS) version is called PC-Pine. WebPine is available to individuals associated with the University of Washington (students, faculty, etc.)—a version of Pine implemented as a web application.

Many people believe that Pine stood for "Pine is not Elm", in the manner of "GNU Is Not Unix", ie. a recursive acronym. However, one of its original authors, Laurence Lundblade, insists this was never the case and that it started off simply as a word and not an acronym, and that his first choice of a backronym for pine would be "Pine Is Nearly Elm". Over time it was changed by the university to mean Program for Internet News and E-mail.[1]

Up to version 3.9.1, the Pine license was similar to BSD, and it stated that

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee to the University of Washington is hereby granted...

The University did, however, register a trademark for the name Pine.

From version 3.9.2, the holder of the copyright, the University of Washington, changed the license so that even if the source code was still available, they did not allow modifications and changes to Pine be distributed by other than themselves. They also claimed that even the old license never allowed distribution of modified versions. [2]

The trademark for the Pine name was part of their position in this matter.[3]

As a reaction, some developers forked version 3.9.1 under the name MANA (for Mail And News Agent) to avoid the trademark issue and the GNU project adopted it as GNU Mana. Richard Stallman claims that the University of Washington threatened[4] to sue the Free Software Foundation for distributing modified Pine, resulting in the development of MANA ceasing and no versions were released[5]

The University of Washington later modified their license somewhat to allow unmodified distribution of Pine alongside collections of free software, but the license still does not conform to the Open Source and the Free Software Guidelines.

In 2006, the University of Washington announced that it stopped development of Pine with Pine 4.64, although Pine continues to be supported.[6]

In its place, it is working on a new family of email tools based upon Pine, to be called Alpine and licensed under the Apache License, version 2. November 29, 2006 saw the first public alpha release,[7][8] which forms a new approach since the alpha test of Pine was always non-public.

Alpine 1.0 was publicly released on December 20, 2007.

  1. ^ Laurence's home page: Naming Pine (English). Retrieved on 2006-08-12.
  2. ^ Branden Robinson remembers UW's unique interpretation of the BSD license (English). Retrieved on 2006-12-14.
  3. ^ What's wrong with Pine (English). Retrieved on 2006-07-17.
  4. ^ RMS said that UW threatened to sue the FSF (English). Retrieved on 2006-12-14.
  5. ^ Debian mailing list archive: License Dispute With University Of Washington (English). Retrieved on 2006-07-17.
    The Golden Rule as Applied to Intellectual Property (English) (2002-12-12). Retrieved on 2006-07-17.
  6. ^ Steve Hubert answers that pine development is frozen in favour of alpine (English). Retrieved on 2006-12-14.
  7. ^ Announce of Alpine 0.8 (English). Retrieved on 2006-12-14.
  8. ^ Alpine FTP download directory (English). Retrieved on 2006-12-19.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_%28e-mail_client%29#Alpine"
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