Pine (e-mail client)
Encyclopedia : P : PI : PIN : Pine (e-mail client)
Pine is a powerful freeware e-mail client: the University of Washington's "Program for Internet News & Email." Many people believe that Pine stood for "Pine is not Elm." However, its original author, 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" [link].
In comparison to other major e-mail clients, Pine is considered by some to organize and archive email efficiently. 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. Pine is mainly used in universities and research institutions, where it is widely considered to be the most efficient e-mail client. Pine's basic features (such as the file carbon copy) are generally very easy to use since the setup options are clearly arranged. More advanced options (which are lacking in most other e-mail clients) require more experience.
There are both Unix and Windows versions of Pine. The Unix version is command line interface-based. Its user interface inspired the text editor Pico. Individuals associated with the university (students, faculty, staff, etc.) are also able to use WebPine, a version of Pine implemented as a web application. Webpine has several interesting characteristics:
- 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
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...
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 licence never allowed distribution of modified versions. 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).
As a reaction to this GNU initiated development of a forked version of Pine, based on the 3.9.1 version, but under another name, MANA, to avoid the trademark issue. University of Washington reacted by threatening to sue the Free Software Foundation for distributing modified Pine, and GNU never officially released the MANA. GNU did, however, use it as a means of pressure against University of Washington and the university later modified their license somewhat to comply with some of the requirements of a free software license.
References
See also
External links
- [del.icio.us Pine links]
- Pine and PGP
- *[Win32 client] - The Windows version is usable as a Portable Application.
- *[Linux client]
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.