On Feb 21, 2007, at 4:56 AM, Adam Kennedy wrote:
Personally, I've always liked the idea we limit CPAN to at least
something like OSI-compatible licenses.
This would at least remove some ambiguity...
Adam K
I strongly disagree. I like the current non-policy to let anything
in, but retroactively to kick out the really nasty junk. The CPAN
FAQ says:
"CPAN and PAUSE are not responsible for any licenses or lack
thereof contained in the contents of the archive. We do recommend
that authors license their modules to avoid legal ambiguity and so
that people may use the code in good conscience. If you require help
with a license, we urge you to consult legal counsel who can give you
sound advice."
-- http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html#How_is_Perl_licensed
With that statement, CPAN is absolving itself of any claim to
represent only open source code. If we have an open-source-only
policy, then someone needs to enforce it. Who do you think should go
through all of the CPAN modules to look for non-OSI-licensed
packages? Well, it looks like RT users are doing that a module at a
time, but slowly:
http://rt.cpan.org/Search/Results.html?Query=Subject+LIKE
+'license'&Order=DESC&OrderBy=Status
For a while Path-Class, Archive-Any and even Encode all lacked
license statements. Happily these are now fixed, but if a policy
like what you propose had been in place they would have not been
allowed in CPAN, much to everyone's loss.
http://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=9203
http://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=14896
http://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=19056
Chris
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