Releasing a project to the Public Doomain

Esteemed monks,

in 1998 or so I wrote a compact library for persistent sessions and user authentication for CGI programs. It allowed to control granularly user permissions over a set of pages and actions and offers persistent CGI objects. It was the basis of quite a number of web sites I wrote then, so I guess it works! :-)

Now I'd like to release it as public domain (it's likely to be obsolete, but maybe someone will find it useful) but I'd like to keep it in a central place, so that if anybody makes a change to the source everybody else benefits. I would also like to find someone who'd be willing to adopt the project. How would you do that?

I was thinking of SourceForge to host the project; anybody's got a better idea?

Comment on Releasing a project to the Public Doomain

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Re: Releasing a project to the Public Doomain by samtregar (Abbot) on Jun 15, 2004 at 21:13 UTC
CPAN of course! If you're not sure where to start, maybe you'd like to read my book. -sam	[reply]
Re^2: Releasing a project to the Public Doomain by l3nz (Friar) on Jun 16, 2004 at 05:12 UTC
CPAN is fine, but I would like a shared CVS too so that people can contribute. I'd love to leave the project more or less alone, but it works, so it would be a pity to trash the module....	[reply]
Re^3: Releasing a project to the Public Doomain by samtregar (Abbot) on Jun 16, 2004 at 17:45 UTC
Are you sure you need one? A few of my modules have a public CVS repository on SourceForge, but as far as I know they've never been used by anyone but me. Even with a popular module like HTML::Template it seems like most folks would rather make a patch against the latest release than bother doing a CVS checkout. -sam	[reply]
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Re: Releasing a project to the Public Doomain by iburrell (Chaplain) on Jun 15, 2004 at 22:27 UTC
I would suggest you release the code under an open source license instead of the public domain. A BSD-like license grants others the right to modify and distribute the code, protects your liability, and removes the uncertainty about whether something is in the public domain. Lots of software that says it is in the public domain does not do a proper delegation and exists in a legal gray area. If you really want to dedicate it to the public domain, check out Creative Commons. They have a dedication you can use.	[reply]
Re: Releasing a project to the Public Doomain by diotalevi (Canon) on Jun 15, 2004 at 21:23 UTC
Sam already told you the best possible advice to your actual question - upload it to http://cpan.org. Be sure to have looked at the other best-practices modules on CPAN like CGI, CGI::Session, and then the various things that tack authentication onto CGI::Session.	[reply]
Re: Releasing a project to the Public Doomain by mpeppler (Vicar) on Jun 16, 2004 at 08:32 UTC
SourceForge is fine, but if you want a more perl-oriented solution you might consider subversion with svn.perl.org for the repository (which is what DBI uses, for example.) I'm not sure how one goes about creating a new repository/project, though... Michael	[reply]
Re^2: Releasing a project to the Public Doomain by Fletch (Bishop) on Jun 16, 2004 at 18:07 UTC
Considering the text at the bottom says contact svn at perl.org . . . :)	[reply]


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