In reviewing the latest additions to CPAN I came across a module posted by a commercial vendor. In place of the usual "same terms as Perl" type license was an EULA that appears to be for the commercial product the module is meant to interface with. The license if full of the usual only if you pay for it, do not modify, do not redistribute, you may not copy any of this code language common to commercial products.

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?
UPDATE:
Thanks for the comments. I did indeed want this to be a general discussion which is why I left the name of the particular module out of the original post.

FWIW - the module I was talking about is DBD::Redbase and it asks that you agree to the included license before you install the module.

My personal feeling is that I would like them to drop the license from the perl mod since it is only an interface to their product. If they feel that the code involved is valuable IP then they should remove it from CPAN and host it themselves.

In reply to Commercial Perl Mods on CPAN by xanthos

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