Pine (e-mail client)
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| Pine | |
 Pine 4.61's main menu under Mac OS X |
|
| Developer: | University of Washington |
|---|---|
| Latest release: | 4.64 / September 28, 2005 |
| OS: | Unix, Windows |
| Use: | E-mail client |
| License: | Freeware |
| Website: | washington.edu/pine |
Pine is a powerful freeware text-based e-mail client: the University of Washington's mail user agent (Email client). Originally written for inexperienced users, Pine's basic features are generally very easy to use. Later versions of Pine have many advanced features including an increasing number of configuration and preference options.
Pine is capable of efficiently organizing and archiving email. For instance, it offers the file carbon copy (FCC) option, in which e-mails to and from a specified address can be saved in a file that stores only those emails. This allows the creation of a file for each contact person that contains all of his or her e-mails with very little effort. The messages in this file can be sorted, viewed, and searched quickly.
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[edit] Supported platforms
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 version is called PC-Pine. WebPine is available to individuals associated with the university (students, faculty, etc.)—a version of Pine implemented as a web application. WebPine has several interesting characteristics, including:
- Ease of use: at the cost of fewer advanced features compared to its Unix and Windows counterparts
- Accessibility: only requires a web browser and proper university credentials
[edit] Acronym
Many people believe that Pine stood for "Pine is not Elm." 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]
[edit] License controversy
Up to version 3.9.1, the Pine license was BSD-like, 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 (i.e. since they owned the name Pine, they essentially controlled anything represented by that name).[3]
[edit] Forks, clones and alternatives
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, but according to Richard Stallman, the University of Washington threatened[4] to sue the Free Software Foundation for distributing modified Pine, so the FSF never officially released the MANA, and the developers discontinued their work on mana.[5]
The University of Washington later modified their license somewhat to allow unmodified distribution of Pine with collections of free software, but the license still does not conform to the Open Source and the Free Software Guidelines.
Mutt is a free alternative, but its user interface, while very customizable, cannot be tweaked to clone the user interface of Pine. Cone is a free e-mail client with a user interface which is more similar to that of Pine than Mutt's user interface is, but does not have as many features as Pine[citation needed].
[edit] Alpine
In 2006, the University of Washington announced that 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 a public alpha release,[6][7] which forms a new approach since the beta test of pine always was non-public and joined only by invitation.
Alpine is currently still under development but bugs and the progress in fixing them can be tracked on their public mailing list.[8] The development of pine has been frozen meanwhile.[9]
[edit] References
- ^ Laurence's home page: Naming Pine (English). Retrieved on August 12, 2006.
- ^ Branden Robinson remembers UW's unique interpretation of the BSD license (English). Retrieved on December 14, 2006.
- ^ What's wrong with Pine (English). Retrieved on July 17, 2006.
- ^ RMS said that UW threatened to sue the FSF (English). Retrieved on December 14, 2006.
- ^ Debian mailing list archive: License Dispute With University Of Washington (English). Retrieved on July 17, 2006.
The Golden Rule as Applied to Intellectual Property (English) (2002-12-12). Retrieved on July 17, 2006. - ^ Announce of Alpine 0.8 (English). Retrieved on December 14, 2006.
- ^ Alpine FTP download directory (English). Retrieved on December 19, 2006.
- ^ Alpine Information Center. Retrieved on October 12, 2006.
- ^ Steve Hubert answers that pine development is frozen in favour of alpine (English). Retrieved on December 14, 2006.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Pine's official homepage
- Alpine's official homepage
- Help and Patches for Pine
- Pine User statistics
- FAQ for comp.mail.pine
- All about pine
- WebPine FAQ
- Pine and PGP
- Win32 client - The Windows version is usable as a portable application.
- Linux client
