Licensing and Clones
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 to be distributed by anyone other than themselves. They also claimed that even the old license never allowed distribution of modified versions.
The trademark for the Pine name was part of their position in this matter.
In 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 to sue the Free Software Foundation for distributing the modified Pine program, resulting in the development of MANA ceasing and no versions being released.
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 so it is semi-free software.
Read more about this topic: Pine (email Client)