
Nano is ANOther editor. The nano project was started because of a few "problems" with the wonderfully easy-to-use and friendly Pico text editor.
First and foremost was its license: the Pine suite does not use the GPL or a GPL-friendly license, and has unclear restrictions on redistribution. Because of this, Pine and Pico are not included with many GNU/Linux distributions. Also, other features (like go-to-line-number or search-and-replace) were unavailable until recently or require a command-line flag. Yuck.
nano aims to solve these problems by emulating the functionality of Pico as closely as possible while addressing the problems above and providing other extra functionality.