Pine is a freeware, text-based email client developed at the University of Washington. The first version was written in 1989, and announced to the public in March 1992. The source code is only available for Unix versions under a license written by the University of Washington. Pine is no longer under development, and has been replaced by Alpine clients, which are available under the Apache License.
Video Pine (email client)
Supported platforms
There are versions of Unix, Windows, and Linux Pines. The Unix/Linux version is a text-based interface - the message editor inspires the Pico text editor. The version of Windows (and earlier DOS) is called PC-Pine . WebPine is available to individuals associated with the University of Washington (students, faculty, etc.) - Pine versions that are implemented as web applications.
Most of these move to Alpine, but there are still many users of this software.
Maps Pine (email client)
Etymology
Many people believe that Pine stands for " P ine I s N ot E lm". One of the original authors, Laurence Lundblade, insisted that this never happened and it started only as a word and not an acronym, and that her first choice of backronym for pine was "Pine Is Nearly Elm". Over time, it was changed by the university to interpret the Programs for Internet News and Email . The original announcement says: "Pine was originally based on Elm, but has evolved since, ('Pine Is No-longer Elm')."
License and clone
Up to version 3.91, Pine's license is similar to BSD, and it states that
- Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and at no cost to the University of Washington is hereby granted...
The university registered a trademark for Pine's name with respect to "computer programs used in communications and electronic mail applications" in March 1995.
From version 3.92, the copyright holder, University of Washington, changed the license so that even if the source code is still available, they do not allow any modifications and changes to Pine to be distributed by anyone. besides themselves. They also claim that even old licenses never allow the distribution of modified versions.
The trademark for Pine names is part of their position on this issue.
In reaction, some developers used version 3.91 under the name of MANA (for Mail and News Agent) to avoid trademark issues and the GNU Project adopted it as GNU Mana. Richard Stallman claimed that the University of Washington threatened to sue the Free Software Foundation to distribute the modified Pine program, which resulted in the development of WHERE stops and no version was released.
The Pico clone GNU nano was also written due to changes in terms of licensing of Pine and Pico, as described by the nano writers in a blog post criticizing the license in 2001.
The University of Washington then modifies their license to allow unmodified Pin distribution along with the free software collection, but the license is still incompatible with Open Source and the Free Software Guide so that the semi-free software, which is effectively a proprietary software.
Alpine
In 2006, the University of Washington announced that it stopped Pine development with Pine 4.64, although Pine continues to be supported.
Instead of a new family of Pine-based email tools, called Alpine and licensed under the Apache License, version 2. 29 November 2006 saw the first public alpha release, which formed a new approach, since Pine's alpha test is always non-public.
Alpine 1.0 was released publicly on December 20, 2007. The latest version 2.21.9 was released on September 19, 2017.
See also
- Alpine (email client)
- Email client comparison
References
External links
- Official website
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments