JCWren raises some seriously good points in his post, and has given me a money-making idea that I offer free to the community... why not form a commercial Perl module certification service?

CPAN testers do what they can to make sure that a module passes its own tests on different platforms, but there's little checking on what those tests are all about. Not a criticism-- people have jobs to do.

So here's an opportunity for someone to make some extra cash. Start a company that verifies and supports Perl modules for a price. If you discover bugs, fix 'em and give the author your changes, and the whole community benefits. Paranoid bosses can feel better with some corporate support they're paying for.

On the other hand, I've worked for some fairly large companies-- HP and 3Com-- and the divisions that I worked for had no problem with the use of CPAN modules, so long as I was willing to vouch for them and fix any problems myself. (Thank god I rarely had to do that...) If one explains this to one's boss, one's boss might get entranced with the wish to play like the big kids play. (On the other hand, "because this guy on perlmonks said this is what they do" is unlikely to carry much weight, but hey...)

stephen