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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • Perhaps a set of clear Terms and Conditions for CPAN Authors is needed to ensure that anyone who uploads this kind of hatred fully expects it to be removed and not even hit BackPAN. His LICENSE agreement pretty much means no-one can use it, not that I can imagine anyone even wanting to.

    Plus, last time I looked a cube has 6 sides not 4. Flamebait or just ignorant? I suspect both.

    • The CPAN is a service provided for free where you are not entitled to expect anything, anyway. No policy is required to justify an unceremonious canning of that piece of trash. How many times has this sort of thing happened that we’d need to make mandates about it? If they’re made, is anyone going to invest the ongoing effort required to enforce them? If so, is that a good use of their time?

      I don’t think we need any kind of explicit policy at this time.

      • You're right, we're not entitled to anything. But I expect a certain amount of professional community ethics on CPAN and it's administration. So far I've always been very happy with their decisions. And if someone decides that there are cases where things are deleted off CPAN, I would expect a policy of what is acceptable and what is not. And having stated this, I indeed think there should be a policy needed to remove any kind of "trash."

        (Especially if emotional reactions and calls for removal seem to go hand in hand.)
        --
        Ordinary morality is for ordinary people. -- Aleister Crowley

        • Well OK then, here’s a simple policy that merely codifies existing community expectation and would suffice to catch this one case: any upload must be under a Free licence.

          Now who is going to comb through everything ever uploaded and every new upload to ensure it complies with this policy?

          Because if you don’t enforce the policy consistently, then all it is is pretence. Removals can be justified by pointing to the policy, but whether you exercise it is every bit as arbitrary as before. All you

          • Sure it's hard work, but that's not what I was talking about. Also, this doesn't seem to have to do something with the actual problem. Would you accept the module if it was under GPL2/Artistic?
            --
            Ordinary morality is for ordinary people. -- Aleister Crowley

            • No, I wouldn’t, but I don’t care about hypothetical situations. We have exactly one problem to deal with right now; there is no flood of hate speech modules to rein in. Until and when that happens, I do not see the value of making policies to deal with hate speech modules, just because we had one black sheep. It is, to put it in Bruce Schneier’s terms, a bad security tradeoff. It will cost a lot of effort to actually implement, and it’s more likely than not that the policy itself wil

              • Well, then we just simply disagree.

                And who in hell's name is talking about "legislative fixes"? Please try not to exaggerate what I am saying, even if it fuels your annoyance. If people have complaints, I find it rather logical to phrase those and state what the actual problem is.

                I find it rather scary, that the only policy you could think of seems to be "No non-free licenses." IMO that is not the large problem causing complaints in this case.

                If one wants to make and execute a judgment about someone else, s
                --
                Ordinary morality is for ordinary people. -- Aleister Crowley

                • Sure, “hate speech” and “controversial humor” are relative, so someone will have to decide if a module falls into those categories or not. But then, that’s the same right now too, just without any phrased words or policies, which will lead the discussions to a morale point.

                  Ah. I think we agree more than we disagree; I just disagree on the last point that not having policy will necessarily mire us in a pointless debate over morale.

                  Oh, and I did not say the module should be

                  • Ah. I think we agree more than we disagree; I just disagree on the last point that not having policy will necessarily mire us in a pointless debate over morale.

                    I feel that we partly are already in such a morale, emotional debate. 80% of comments about this module contain the words "crap", "trash", "shit" and other such terms. Not that I want to say it isn't (personally though, I just think it's strange humor), but saying "it's just crap, delete it" is not so far for me from full morale discussions.

                    Oh,

                    --
                    Ordinary morality is for ordinary people. -- Aleister Crowley

          • Well OK then, here’s a simple policy that merely codifies existing community expectation and would suffice to catch this one case: any upload must be under a Free licence.

            I was under the impression that this was already a requirement. Upon further research it appears this was not set out as straightforward as I thought.

            The CPAN FAQ specifically fobids [cpan.org] software which requires a fee to use, and says that if the license is not included [cpan.org] you should ask the author for clarification. That same section [cpan.org] does however talk about the OSI approved licenses, although it puts "approved" in quotes.

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