On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 13:15, demerphq <demerphq@gmail.com> wrote: > On 19 January 2012 18:32, demerphq <demerphq@gmail.com> wrote: >> On 19 January 2012 18:08, Vladimir V. Perepelitsa <inthrax@gmail.com> wrote: >>> If I know, that something on CPAN will not work, or will work badly with my >>> module I prefer to protect from such interaction. >> >> If that is your attitude you should hide your code away and make sure >> that anyone that uses it signs a contract about terms of use. But that >> also means it doesn't belong on CPAN and isn't really what I would >> call "free software". AnyEvent is released under the same terms as >> Perl itself. Therefore it is "free software". Therefore anyone can >> take the code and do pretty much whatever they want to it. But they >> can't do the same with the version on CPAN, doesn't that strike you as >> being the antithesis of "free software"? > > I thought about this a lot last night, and I call bullshit on myself. > > The code is forkable as it is released under the PAL. > > If people don't like the restriction they can fork it. > > I still think such a restriction is a pretty anti-social thing to do, > but it has nothing to do with whether the software is free or not. > > My apologies for ranting. Actually I wasn't aware that software you uploaded to the CPAN even had to be free software. E.g. this module is not: https://metacpan.org/module/Lisp::Fmt#COPYRIGHT And the CPAN FAQ only mentions that most modules are free software, not that your module has to be as well: http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html#How_is_Perl_licensed Anyway, these sort of problems with the CPAN keep coming up, usually when some important module needs a bugfix and the original author is unavailable. It would be much easier to deal with those issues if the CPAN had a selection of community-maintained indexes instead of the single monolothic index that it has now, then you could just subscribe to another index and make all these problems go away.