Re: Is it worth tracking down absent cpan owners?

I would like to add a word of caution here, before you go out and for lack of answer from the author, take over the maintenance of these modules.

First and foremost one has to look into the licence under which the module is published. The fact that you are allowed to use the modules for "free" does not necessarily mean that you may change them and re-publish them under the same name. Even "open source" licences can still reserve the copyright of the module. While derivative work is generally less of a problem (read: opening a new branch based upon a common basis), most of the time you cannot re-use the basename. There are a huge number of "open source" licences out there and each one is at least a little different from all others.

The Artistic Licence is very clear that you cannot re-use the original name for your derivative work. The GPL is less clear in that respect, but IMO neither does it allow you to re-use the orignal name. Both of these licences apply to Sybase::RepAgent. For Sybase::TdsServer I could not find any licence, which is actually worse since it means full copyright rules would apply!

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

Comment on Re: Is it worth tracking down absent cpan owners?

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Re^2: Is it worth tracking down absent cpan owners? by adamk (Chaplain) on Aug 30, 2006 at 01:03 UTC
The namespaces that a particular distribution may use are not the "name" of the distribution. The name of the distribution would be something like Sybase-RegAgent-1.23 Every upload to CPAN has a different name. Many contain overlapping implementations that wish to occupy the same namespace. What the CPAN indexer does, is establish a loose form of property rights for those namespaces. Thus, the indexer decides which distribution controls which namespaces at any given time. But "Sybase::RegAgent" is not the name of the actual Perl distribution.	[reply]
Re^3: Is it worth tracking down absent cpan owners? by CountZero (Bishop) on Aug 30, 2006 at 09:08 UTC
Thanks for the clarification, I was not aware of all the little details of the indexer. If I understand it correctly: the author decides on the name of the module (e.g. RegAgent) and he puts this under a namespace (e.g. Sybase) which is not his property (is it CPAN's?) and the indexer joins this all together and adds a version number. From a legal point of view it doesn't change much as you --depending on the kind of licence-- probably still are not allowed to "update/upgrade" the module and publish it under the same author-given name. If the only difference is the version number, it is probably not enough to sail clear of legal problems with ownership and copyright of the "name". CountZero "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law	[reply]
Re^4: Is it worth tracking down absent cpan owners? by adamk (Chaplain) on Aug 31, 2006 at 03:38 UTC
No, this is not the case. There's two parts to this, the module namespace and the actual distribution. The distribution is essentially the tarball (sorta). It will have a name like Sybase-RegAgent-1.tar.gz However, as far as the database is concerned, it has a "name" of "Sybase-RegAgent". Within that distribution, there will be one or more modules/classes. In this case, by convention only, it will probably have Sybase::RegAgent. It may also have Sybase::RegAgent::SomethingElse, and it might also have completely different classes like Some::Thing::Else. The naming of the distribution is entirely orthogonal to the modules inside it, and the namespaces it uses. For example, the distribution named "mod_perl" has modules like Apache2::Something. The namespace is only property in the most general sense. The CPAN looks to the index for what module is in what distribution and installs whatever distribution the index says. A client using a different CPAN (should you set up an alternative one) would install something different. You can also override it at any time you like. So possibly "property" in the sense that a domain name is property. And since there are no legal transfer of ownership, the entire namespace of CPAN is probably really "owned" by Andreas, the guy that created the CPAN. If it's true there's issues with reusing the "name", the new maintainer could certainly rename the distribution and continue using the same module names without issue. But then CPAN is a practical place. Until the day that someone cares, we'll keep doing what works. And the truth is that so far nobody cares. :)	[reply]