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Contributed Modules in Perl Core
A Social Contract about Artistic Control
What follows is a statement about artistic control, defined as the ability
of authors of packages to guide the future of their code and maintain
control over their work. It is a recognition that authors should have
control over their work, and that it is a responsibility of the rest of
the Perl community to ensure that they retain this control. It is an
attempt to document the standards to which we, as Perl developers, intend
to hold ourselves. It is an attempt to write down rough guidelines about
the respect we owe each other as Perl developers.
This statement is not a legal contract. This statement is not a legal
document in any way, shape, or form. Perl is distributed under the GNU
Public License and under the Artistic License; those are the precise legal
terms. This statement isn't about the law or licenses. It's about
community, mutual respect, trust, and good-faith cooperation.
We recognize that the Perl core, defined as the software distributed with
the heart of Perl itself, is a joint project on the part of all of us.
From time to time, a script, module, or set of modules (hereafter referred
to simply as a "module") will prove so widely useful and/or so integral to
the correct functioning of Perl itself that it should be distributed with
Perl core. This should never be done without the author's explicit
consent, and a clear recognition on all parts that this means the module
is being distributed under the same terms as Perl itself. A module author
should realize that inclusion of a module into the Perl core will
necessarily mean some loss of control over it, since changes may
occasionally have to be made on short notice or for consistency with the
rest of Perl.
Once a module has been included in the Perl core, however, everyone
involved in maintaining Perl should be aware that the module is still the
property of the original author unless the original author explicitly
gives up their ownership of it. In particular:
1) The version of the module in the core should still be considered the
work of the original author. All patches, bug reports, and so forth
should be fed back to them. Their development directions should be
respected whenever possible.
2) Patches may be applied by the pumpkin holder without the explicit
cooperation of the module author if and only if they are very minor,
time-critical in some fashion (such as urgent security fixes), or if
the module author cannot be reached. Those patches must still be
given back to the author when possible, and if the author decides on
an alternate fix in their version, that fix should be strongly
preferred unless there is a serious problem with it. Any changes not
endorsed by the author should be marked as such, and the contributor
of the change acknowledged.
3) The version of the module distributed with Perl should, whenever
possible, be the latest version of the module as distributed by the
author (the latest non-beta version in the case of public Perl
releases), although the pumpkin holder may hold off on upgrading the
version of the module distributed with Perl to the latest version
until the latest version has had sufficient testing.
In other words, the author of a module should be considered to have final
say on modifications to their module whenever possible (bearing in mind
that it's expected that everyone involved will work together and arrive at
reasonable compromises when there are disagreements).
As a last resort, however:
4) If the author's vision of the future of their module is sufficiently
different from the vision of the pumpkin holder and perl5-porters as a
whole so as to cause serious problems for Perl, the pumpkin holder may
choose to formally fork the version of the module in the core from the
one maintained by the author. This should not be done lightly and
should *always* if at all possible be done only after direct input
from Larry. If this is done, it must then be made explicit in the
module as distributed with Perl core that it is a forked version and
that while it is based on the original author's work, it is no longer
maintained by them. This must be noted in both the documentation and
in the comments in the source of the module.
Again, this should be a last resort only. Ideally, this should never
happen, and every possible effort at cooperation and compromise should be
made before doing this. If it does prove necessary to fork a module for
the overall health of Perl, proper credit must be given to the original
author in perpetuity and the decision should be constantly re-evaluated to
see if a remerging of the two branches is possible down the road.
In all dealings with contributed modules, everyone maintaining Perl should
keep in mind that the code belongs to the original author, that they may
not be on perl5-porters at any given time, and that a patch is not
official unless it has been integrated into the author's copy of the
module. To aid with this, and with points #1, #2, and #3 above, contact
information for the authors of all contributed modules should be kept with
the Perl distribution.
Finally, the Perl community as a whole recognizes that respect for
ownership of code, respect for artistic control, proper credit, and active
effort to prevent unintentional code skew or communication gaps is vital
to the health of the community and Perl itself. Members of a community
should not normally have to resort to rules and laws to deal with each
other, and this document, although it contains rules so as to be clear, is
about an attitude and general approach. The first step in any dispute
should be open communication, respect for opposing views, and an attempt
at a compromise. In nearly every circumstance nothing more will be
necessary, and certainly no more drastic measure should be used until
every avenue of communication and discussion has failed.
--
Version 1.2. By Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) and the perl5-porters.
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