[Noisebridge-discuss] Know C? I have a project for you this weekend

[Asheesh Laroia]

Dear Noisebridge-discuss,

I'm the user and Debian maintainer of alpine, a command-line mail and news 
reader that has a long history. (It descends directly from the famous 
University of Washington PINE mail and usenet reader.)

Maildir is one of the two most popualar methods of storing mail on *NIX 
systems. The alpine developers have not been interested in adding Maildir 
support. There is a good Maildir patch for alpine, but its author has not 
agreed to share it under an open source license.

Debian users who use alpine have been clamoring for a version of alpine 
that is (a) still open source, and (b) supports Maildir. Alas, I know of 
no decent patch that satisfies these two properties at once.

WHAT TO DO?

So the obvious thing to do is re-write that patch myself. I would just do 
that, except copyright law generally suggests that if I have read the code 
and then write something intended to be identical in functionality, I am 
probably violating the copyright on the non-open-source patch.

YOU CAN HELP!

If I read the non-open-source patch and write documentation, and you take 
that documentation and write a patch and *do* release it as open source, 
then we can have an open source Maildir patch.

JOIN ME!

Reply and we'll get the ball rolling. If you're decent at C, I think that 
in one solid afternoon (noon to six, say), we can have this entirely done.

You will earn fame, joy, and my ever-lasting admiration. Also I can throw 
in some alcohol or pizza if it helps. (-:

Yours truly,

-- Asheesh.

-- 
Sometimes I wonder if I'm in my right mind.  Then it passes off and I'm
as intelligent as ever.
 		-- Samuel Beckett, "Endgame"