[Report issue] Perl Organization dependency

[jonathimer]

Page

https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/perl-perl5/contributors?timeRange=past365days&start=2025-05-06&end=2026-05-06&widget=organization-dependency&auth=success

Project

Perl

Issue Area

Contributors

Widget

Organization dependency

Describe the issue

"CPAN" is not an organization. It's Perl's package ecosystem and publishing platform.

It consists of thousands of individuals, where at best a couple handful are in a position of influence by the fact that they maintain the services and tools that everyone uses.

There is no "organization" control of neither Perl nor CPAN, so the risks of a project being "taken over" by an organization is practically zero.

So the "thumbs down" judgement isn't only wrong, it's actually misleading to anyone who isn't familiar with the distributed and (almost) "anarchistic" nature of these open source communities.

This same community quality to an "organization" also applies to several of the next few orgs: The Perl Foundation, Perl Toolchain Gang, and Moose.

Steps to reproduce

Assume that CPAN is a single "organization". It's not. It's an ecosystem of many communities.

Expected vs. actual behavior

Treat CPAN as a community of volunteers, where each individual may choose to associate themselves with this name - or not. It's their own choice. Nobody is paid, and CPAN has no shareholders or CEOs that might take over the project (like what happend with Ruby Central).

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Jira Issue: DE-942

[Leont]

I guess that this measure is based on email addresses, which may be sensible for Linux, but isn't necessarily valid for a lot of other projects. Everyone with a @cpan.org mail address should be assumed to be an individual contributor.