Ken Williams wrote: > That said, there ought to be a way for the community to move forward > without having the original author be the bottleneck. With open-source > licenses, there's explicitly a way for someone else in the community to > pick up the reins and release a "derivative" of the original code > without seeking the permission of the original author: JFDI. Change the > namespace if you must. People will cope, it's better than having no new > release at all.
You do not even need to change the namespace; if people would like to show that they are ready to take over a module, there is nothing to stop them "proving themselves" by just uploading the it to CPAN. They won't get indexed (or, in turn, downloaded automatically by the CPAN shell), but they will still be carried by the CPAN network, and show up on search.cpan.org. Then, all you need is a suitably convincing petition of users to have the namespace handed over, or have the original author approve the hand-over. IOW "Show me the code" :) With Perl 6, and once the core cpan network and installation modules support this adequately, you even have a workaround; just tell your users to write; use Crypt::Rijndael-(Any)-SCHNEIER; There will be much more on this topic in the cpan6 announcement talk at YAPC::Eu in Birmingham. Sam.
