On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 11:10:45PM +0100, Matt Sergeant wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Apr 2001, Kurt D. Starsinic wrote:
>
> > > > Sorry, we do not provide IDs for companies and organisations.
> > >
> > > Yeah I think I knew this already. I talked about it with Andreas at the
> > > last perl conference, and I guess I'll have to discuss it again. There's
> > > really no reason for it, when the software being uploaded is open
> > > source, IMHO.
> >
> > I think there is a reason for it. Each file on PAUSE is uploaded by
> > *a* person who's ultimately responsible for it. You don't have that with
> > files `owned' by a list -- you've thrown away the information of who did
> > the upload.
>
> That's a different matter when it's not a list, but a company though. If
> you think about it, there's even more responsibility with a company than
> with an individual.
Not necessarily. A company isn't a breathing entity, and a company
didn't send the email requesting the PAUSE ID. A person did, and we don't
want to get in the business of determining whether that person speaks for
that company.
It's also entirely possible that support for and awareness of some CPAN
effort by a particular company just dies (say, the last or only employee
involved in the project leaves). Now, say I want to take over maintenance,
and I email `the company', and either receive no response, or a response from
a pointy-haired manager saying `I don't understand Open Source, but that code
belongs to my company, and I don't want you to change it, nyah.'
> > Also, it's not too rare that a list to dissolves, but the last
> > person who left the list doesn't know that they're the last one to leave.
> > This makes it even harder to pick up dropped packages.
>
> That's a problem regardless of whether it's a person, a company, or a
> list. Ultimately it comes down to licensing and trust.
>
> In fact, I could have written personally asking for a PAUSEID called
> "AXKIT", and just shared the password. Same issues.
Yes, you could have, and that would have been lying, and I ask you not
to do that. You would have been declaring yourself the only point person,
and I would _hope_ that, if anybody else on the AXKIT list declared in a
public forum, `I wrote such-and-such module and here is my response to your
bug report/feature request', that said person would be flamed or ignored.
If you're claiming that there's some hardship for you in creating a
list and one or more ID's, please describe it. If not, then I think you're
just proposing a scheme to hide information, which I don't support.
- Kurt
