On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Chris Dolan wrote:
"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:
Insisting on an OSI-approved license is basically shorthand for insisting
on a license which allows the things that it must allow for uploading to
PAUSE to be viable.
1. It must allow end-users to _use_ the software
2. It must allow CPAN and _all_ its mirrors to redistribute the software
Saying a license should be OSI-approved is a simple test to avoid exactly
the kind of silly wrangling the PerlBuildSystem license has created.
In this particular case, the PBS license is in violation of #1, and IMO
doesn't belong on CPAN. Of course, you could argue that only #2 is
important for CPAN, but I think it's worth insisting on #1 just to
simplify people's use of CPAN.
I don't think _anyone_ should go through all of CPAN looking for things
which break this policy, but removing it as we find it quite reasonable.
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
Insisting on _a_ license is actually a really good idea. Absent an
explicit license, CPAN does not have the right to redistribute the
software, nor do mirrors.
-dave
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