The Feng Shui of CPAN

«Palms create a moiré pattern at the Helsinki Botanical Garden.»

Friday morning began a bit more abruptly than usual since the normally rather inperturbable Jarkko grabbed my arm and pulled me out of bed. He noticed that the CPAN's main web page had somehow changed and thought that we had either been hacked or that someone had hijacked the DNS so I had to start poking around before being appropriately caffienated for the day. It was not an auspicious beginning. After a while, I determined that our main web host for CPAN, which is separate from the FUNET mothership since that host is ftp only, decided to redo the main index page, include a bunch of ads with a link to the 'real CPAN page'. I moved the DNS to another host inside the US which has a lot of bandwidth and who had offered previously to be the primary web host for CPAN while we figured out what was going on. The explanation we were offered was that they 'forgot' to tell us about the change in spite of remembering to show it to others. I have some beachfront poperty in Siberia to sell, too.

CPAN has, over the years, been a popular target for criticism since it's not a portal, an enterprise solution, or a myriad of other faddish things that seem to come and go every week on the internet. Many people from other languages have asked how to make their own CPAN and Jarkko wrote The Zen of Comprehensive Archive Networks to try to explain how and I've given the Grokking the CPAN talk at a few conferences attempting to explain how it all works. The CPAN is now, and will be for the foreseeable future, a simple ftp archive. This is all it is; no more, no less. This very simplicity is its strength and its secret to longevity. The various search engines, the RT queue, the testers results, and every other service in the CPAN domain is wholly separate from the archive itself. Those who wish to do something with CPAN and offer it to the world are encouraged to do so, but the second you mess with the heart and soul of the archive, you're going to meet a brick wall.

Since those of us who mind the archive have been on the net since 1985 or earlier, we tend to forget that the obvious for us is not common sense anymore in the post-AOL age of the internet. CPAN has very few rules as we'd like to think of it as one of the last and true holdouts of what the 'free' in free software democracy really means. Open Source is rife with cabals and politics, but unless you're an idiot who really goes out of your way to disturb the overall operation of CPAN, you're free to do what you like. With few exceptions, authors can share their non-commercial code freely via CPAN. People complain that there is a lot of crap on CPAN and, well, they're right, but there's a lot of good stuff there too. CPAN isn't an 'enterprise solution' and I've told people countless times over the years that creating bundles of their own favourite modules or mirroring a subset of CPAN is an attractive option, but CPAN itself isn't going to do that work for you.

There is one policy that we always thought was obvious, clear and self-evident; no ads. In an age of the internet where just about every page you visit has some sort of eyesore layout with blinking ads, CPAN, CTAN and others like us are sites who refuse to sell our souls to the lure of the easy lucre to be made. We can't prevent people who mirror CPAN from placing ads all over their site, but we won't ever list them in the public mirror index. When a few friends at Sun gave us 3 big systems to rescue the search engine, which was chugging on an old Sun Ultra1 with 4GB of diskspace, we settled on doing a little 'powered by Sun' logo addition to try and show our appreciation since it was a tremendous lifesaver. Sadly, it seems to have given folks the idea that it's open season on advertising via their CPAN mirrors. Over the weekend, the following was added to the comments in the index.html to make the policy more obvious;

LEGALESE

You are not allowed to remove or alter these comments.

You are not allowed to rename, remove, or add any files in your public mirror of CPAN.

You are not allowed to alter any file in you public mirror of CPAN EXCEPT that you can add a short acknowledgement for example for your hosting company, company, university, or sponsor into this CPAN top-level index.html by adding a small non-animated image and a hyperlink pointing to your organization with text like "hosted by", "powered by", or "sponsored by" by placing it visually next to the "CPAN master site hosted by FUNET" acknowledgement at the bottom of the page. The image used may not be larger than the one used for the FUNET logo.

Technical sidenote: if you do add an acknowledgement link, please do think of the consequences to your possible downstream CPAN mirrors.

Altering this index.html in any other way is not allowed. Altering any other files is not allowed.

Adding any advertisements or revenue-generating material is strictly forbidden.

Similarly, for your public CPAN mirrors "wrapping" the CPAN web pages into other sites by using e.g. HTML frames is not allowed.

You are allowed to use the files of CPAN to create your own web sites and services since we are just a distributor of the files, we do not own most of them. However, you may not call your creations "CPAN" or "CPAN mirrors". You may say that the files are "mirrored from CPAN".

I will likely add this to the CPAN FAQ as well. Yes, everybody has to eat, yadda, yadda, yadda. If you can't afford to be a public mirror without advertising, then don't be a mirror. Chris Nandor and OSDN have hosted use.perl.org for years and never has there been a single ad or blinking anything as they've been happy with the acknowledgements in the FAQ. If you enjoy using the search.cpan search engine, Webster University in St. Louis and Ben Hockenhull are the ones to blame and I don't get to St. Louis nearly often enough to buy him the countless beers I owe him in lieu of blinking banner ads. Numerous mirrors spread the CPAN to almost every continent on the globe [anyone in antarctica want to mirror CPAN? :)] without the expectation that someone owes them something for the service. At the very least, they should be able to mirror CPAN from somewhere other than the FUNET mirror and not get someone elses advertisements. It's not an advertising portal or a dessert topping or a floorwax; it's an ftp mirror. Remember that and if you see a mirror with google ads or other advertising, know that it is not to be called a CPAN mirror.