So, I was contacted by someone yesterday with patches for a module I wrote during my employment at Fotango. I thought it might be a good idea to release these patches, but looking at the module in question, I quickly realised that I didn’t actually have rights to upload an updated version, because the module in question is owned on CPAN by the FOTANGO CPAN user.
This complicates matters no end. You see, Fotango was shut down by it’s parent company quite a while back. There is no Fotango anymore. I no longer have access to the FOTANGO CPAN account, nor do I know any person that does.
I contacted Alias. He’s trying to sort it out.
I know, for example, in theory the property rights for Fotango revert to the parent company (though the exactly who owns that IP is something that the lawyers probably know – I’m not sure myself.) Obviously the code isn’t the issue here; The code is open source and licensed in such a way that it can be forked by me quite happily. The real question here is, is the CPAN ID intellectual property? Are the CPAN namespaces? Do they have value in the same way that a domain name does?
If the answer is yes, then we need to get then we’ve got bigger issues at foot than who owns the Fotango modules. Anyone who has released company code using their own CPAN ID rather than a company one (which is currently considered best practice) is registering IP that belongs to the company in their own name. That can’t be right.
If the answer is no, then the namespaces are just things that someone (presumably the PAUSE admins and/or the modules mailing list) control and “ownership” of a module is just a handy tag to let the automated systems do automated tasks so a real human doesn’t keep having to make judgement calls every five minutes. This doesn’t mean the real human doesn’t need guidelines and rules to work within however. What’s the correct thing to do when a company (or for that matter, human) dies? I think my argument stands that the “ownership” doesn’t transfer like other property rights.
I’m sure that Greater Minds than myself have already debated and come to conclusions on this; Anyone want to point me towords the guidelines?
You’re confusing the PAUSE ID with the identity of an owner. The two are not the same. The owner of the IP, in this case the code, is as written in the Copyright statement. If that happens to be a company, rather than an individual, so be it. Hopefully the licence listed is clear enough to explain what you can and can’t do with the code. In this case you’re free to fork, etc as you note.
However, the PAUSE ID is not necessarily the owner. In many cases it just so happens that they are. Or at least part-owner :) The PAUSE ID is better described as the identity of the release manager. It is the person that is responsible for ensuring that the distribution is correctly packaged and uploaded to PAUSE/CPAN. There are now several projects which follow this practice and are the better for it IMHO.
The problem that the PAUSE Admins face is that the PAUSE ID identity of FOTANGO belongs to the parent company, and as such finding someone to actually agree that maintainership can pass to another person (ex-employee or otherwise) is difficult as it can take time to find the right person to give authorisation, and in some cases understand what they are authorising.
Personally I think there should be better agreed terms to signing up to receiving a PAUSE account, so that regardless of whether you sign up as an individual or a corporate identity, if at any time the identity ceases to be active, the PAUSE Admins have the right to reassign the identity of the release manager to another PAUSE ID. Essentially meaning that if the company is folded, the PAUSE Admins can give co-maintainer access to another PAUSE ID to then make future releases. However, I think it will take time before someone can figure out the best way to approach this.
The link you’re looking for though is .. http://pause.perl.org/pause/query?ACTION=pause_04about#takeover .. where even that references the maintainer, not the owner.
I guess the issue here is that of identity. You’re right that “The PAUSE ID is better described as the identity of the release manager”. It’s not IP and doesn’t transfer like other IP.
The bit that doesn’t square with me is the statement “the PAUSE ID identity of FOTANGO belongs to the parent company”. Does it? Is identity transferable like that? We’re not talking about a company that subsumed another company, but rather one that closed down another and transfered the IP….
Alias has been helping me with the thankless task of working out what to do next, and I’ve sent emails to people that should eventually either get to the right person in Fotango’s parent company to authorize this (or ignore us, so we can officially declare the maintainer as “non-responsive”.)
Excellent site, keep up the good work