Subject: licensing issues

From: Frank Tobin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 17:07:55 -0500 (CDT)

Recently, the FreeBSD security team decided to mark the Pine port as
FORBIDDEN, due to a high suspiscion of buffer-overflow problems (e.g.,
grepping the source for strcpy and friends), and the history of related
programs.  This move has been dicussed lengthily on the freebsd-security
mailing list, and some ideas that have come up talk concern the licensing
of Pine, which may limit the ability of developers to share developments
in an Open Source fashion.

My question is this: has there been any thought given to the prospect of
licensing Pine under a dual license: its current license, and the GPL?  
As far as I can tell, The GPL is a "tighter" license than the current one,
so it would not give away any owernship problems UofW would be concerned
with.  Providing Pine under the GPL, a highly standardized license, would
solve any concern about validness of Pine as Open Source or Free Software.

This may become more and more of an issue as people wishing to maintain
Pine outside of UofW try to fix security issues in the Pine package.  

Pine is, of course, highly popular due to it's user-friendliness and
interface-design, and I would hate to see it diminish because simply of
licensing problems.

Perl simillarly does a dual-licensing; it distributes under both the
Artistic (a fairly liberal license) and the GPL (a tighter license); the
end-user can choose which license to apply.

-- 
Frank Tobin		http://www.uiuc.edu/~ftobin/

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