Does this module belong on CPAN? If you own the vendors product, then you should know to look to their site to get it.

I feel that they are using CPAN to place an unpaid ad for their product. How do others feel about this?

On the one hand, yes it does seem a little bit like free product advertising (very little, as I highly doubt that the advertising benefit is all that great). On the other hand, the only license restriction that I see for CPAN is this:

Does CPAN allow contributions of shareware or code that requests a fee of any kind?

No. Everything on CPAN is free of charge. The reason for this is that CPAN is the product of hundreds of people donating their time and resources for the common good of the Perl community. There are places on the net where one can offer shareware without treading on the generosity of others and this is not that place.

Also, there are alot of interfaces to commercial products on CPAN. DBD::Oracle, DBD::Informix, and DBD::Sybase, just to name some of the DBD modules. DBD::Informix was written by an Informix person and is currently (but not originally) supported by Informix (now IBM), which is seen as a good thing by the users of DBD::Informix. DBD::Oracle users are not so lucky. Last time I had a problem (a segfault on certain types of sql statements which brought down the database server, but was not reproducable in SQL*Plus), I had to be careful not to mention perl, and write a test case in 'C' before I could get any help from the Oracle people.

Finally, if I had their product, needed a perl interface to it, and their site was down, I'd be glad to be able to get it from CPAN. Maybe they should distribute the perl module with their product, but then the same could be said for getting updates.