The computing and networking group at the University of Washington has released Alpine, an open-source e-mail client for the desktop and the web. It's based on Pine, the ancient but rock solid text-based e-mail client also developed at UW.
You may remember Pine from your school's computer lab, your dad's old Windows 3.1 box or (if you're like Epicenter's Dylan Tweney) from when you last checked your mail. Though it's been the choice of Unix power users for almost two decades, Pine is also remarkably easy to use and simple enough for just about anyone to pick up.
But Pine is a copyrighted work – UW owns it and felt that they had taken development as far as they could. Also, Pine's license prevents the distribution of modified versions. So, the computing group at the school decided to re-work Pine's code from the ground up and release it under version 2.0 of the Apache License.
And now we have Alpine, an open-source, fully customizable lightweight client that looks and acts like Pine, but has been almost completely rewritten. Also included in the Alpine package is a web-based version, which was previously only available to UW students.
So, if you've ever wanted to take a stab at building a better Gmail, here's a great place to start.
[via Slashdot]
