2 posts tagged “darkpan”

A few months ago, when discussing how to support the 'darkpan' (what Perl programmers call the vast body of perl code floating around the internet or in private companies that we know nothing about) I suggested leveraging the vast CPAN distribution system as a sort of continuous integration/build service which we could offer as a for pay service to companies using Perl.  This would have the dual benefit of encouraging corporations to package up their perl code properly (ie as  CPAN module with a Makefile.PL, etc) and could help raise money to sponser Perl development.

What I'm thinking about would be similar to a ruby only service I noticed: http://runcoderun.com

Check that out and let me know what you think.  What kind of services would the 'quasipan' be required to offer in order to entice companies into paying for it?  For example, what do you think of the idea of being able to build a EC2 or other cloud image type from a base OS that intergrate any given set of CPAN and Darkcpan modules?  Like, "I want a virtualbox VM with Perl 5.10.1 on debian with git, postgresql and Catalyst preinstalled, although with my private repo of proprietary code?"

With all the discussion about CPAN reliability and hair pulling over worrying what's going on in the Darkpan, I was just thinking: Why not extend CPAN for Corporate / Non Free stuff?  Basically we'd extend CPAN so that authors could release source code under more restricted licenses but  you'd have to pay a reasonable fee for the privilege.

This would accomplish the following:

1) Encourage people to follow the best practice of writing everything as CPAN module, so that they could take advantage of CPANs vast smoke testing system and receive more timely alerts to when new releases of dependencies causes breakage.

2) Be a source of income for the Perl community, which we could use to fund important stuff

3) Create less worry about causing breakages

4) Allow a company to generate an alternative income source for their code.

Now, I'm an open source believer, and do my best to convince my employers to release as much code as possible, since this almost always ends up as better code once it's in the wild.  But there's always going to be some things that are in house, stuff that reflect the unique business rules and the companies investment in technology.  Given that we all agree validating Darkpan is important and that writing your code as well tested CPAN modules is the right way to code Perl, do we think there's an opportunity here to build out something everyone can benefit from?