Pine is a free text email client developed at the University of Washington in 1989. It was release in 1992 with full UNIX source code. Pine is no longer under development, and has been replaced by the Alpine client, which is available under the Apache License. Internet folklore says PINE is an acronym, Pine Is Not Elm.
Over the years the pine license has changed to where it no longer adhered to the open source nature of that community. After the University of Washington decided to trademark the name Pine, they also restricted the license. From version 3.92 modifications and changes to Pine would no longer be permitted by anyone other than the university.
In 2006, the University of Washington announced that it stopped development of Pine with Pine 4.64. They launched a new email package called Alpine under the more open source friendly Apache License. Alpine 1.0 was publicly released on December 20, 2007. Version 2.0 was released in 26 August 2008. "Alpine" officially stands for Alternatively Licensed Program for Internet News and Email.[11] UW has also referred to it as "Apache Licensed Pine".