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What was the fate of Fotango?

Alias on 2009-08-19T05:27:20

This morning I received a request from a former employee of Fotango to take over the FOTANGO CPAN account. Of course, I can't give it to him. I also can't give him control of his own code that he wrote while at the company to maintain.

This sort of thing is exactly the reason that we strongly try to discourage the creation of "company" CPAN authors. A company is a short-lived entity, and most will die or be shut down or be bought out or merge or otherwise change during the time it exists. Companies also rarely die outright, they liquidate. Their property becomes the property of some other company, endless recycled between various legal entities that might have no idea about the original.

When a company vanishes or gets bought out, any ability to control those modules as a primary author vanish as well.

This CPAN author is now going to have to apply for co-maintainer rights to his own code in order to keep maintaining it, and demonstrate in the usual way that he has attempted to make contact with the original author (the legal remains of Fotango, wherever they exist).

Of course, if someone knows what the ultimate fate of the Fotango corporate entity is, and can arrange for someone representing the current state of that entity to inform me of who I should reissue a password to for the FOTANGO login, I'd prefer to do that.

Anyone?

It is I

2shortplanks on 2009-08-19T08:17:17

I am that fateful ex-employee that Alias is describing. For the record, I didn't ask to take over FOTANGO, but said that I'd like to take over the modules, and I'm up for whatever's the easiest way to do that, giving me access back to the fotango account, changing the email address, or just giving me co-maint on the modules.

To quote Gross Pointe Blank (mainly because I like quoting Gross Pointe Blank, rather than for any real reason)

Martin: Whole grain pancakes and an egg-white omelette, please.
Waitress: What would you like in your omelette?
Martin: Nothing in the omelette. Nothing at all.
Waitress: Well, that's not technically an omelette.
Martin: Look, I don't want to get into a semantic argument about it, I just want the protein, all right?

To add context of why the FOTANGO company account was set up, it was a reaction to the opposite problem we had: Employees are short lived too. Traditionally Fotango let people release modules on their own accounts. But then we had a case of someone leaving the company and then going unresponsive to patches to a module they originally developed for the company that the company was still developing.

I guess you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.

I'd suggest for all future people doing this that they give co-maint rights to all the authors. That still leaves the question of how to change primary owner rights; Some sort of dead man's handle where co-maints can take over primary ownership? A bigger issue than I need to address today.

Still, the thing about making omelets is that you have to break a few eggs (groan.)

Re:It is I

Alias on 2009-08-19T10:12:25

My apologies.

I didn't suggest to imply it was some kind of surreptitious takeover

Re:It is I

Alias on 2009-08-19T10:21:04

My apologies.

I didn't suggest to imply it was some kind of surreptitious takeover.

For smaller companies, the way we recommend you set up shared release is to identify one person as a responsible headline/lead developer.

In this scenario we're talking the likes of Matt Sergeant, Brad Fitzpatrick, Jesse Vincent. People with a more public profile, people who won't just vanish, and ideally people that are part owners.

When an employee uploads a package, you transfer all of the primary namespace rights to this headline person, retaining co-maint rights for the original uploader and anyone else that needs to upload.

If employees leave, you still have the most reliable (and just as importantly, the easiest person to hunt down and contact) person able to push new co-maint bits out to anyone necessary.

If the company goes under, this person is easy for CPAN admins to find and obtain rights to hand off the namespace.

If the person dies or leaves the company, again this is much easier for us as admins to deal with, especially if all the copyright statements still retain the company name.

This method should work for anything but the largest organisations. For them, there is a special type of "mailing list" permissions artifact that Andreas can set up for these special cases. So far there are no more than about 10 of these.

Re:It is I

jesse on 2009-08-21T04:20:35

Making me personally the maintainer for all the modules released by staff at my company is...very not right. Often, I have nothing to do with the modules other than that I pay the wonderful perl hackers who produce them.

I've been procrastinating getting a 'BPS' or 'BESTPRACTICAL' PAUSE account for the company, but it (or some other affordance) that allows collective maintainership by me and my coworkers really needs to happen.

Re:It is I

Alias on 2009-08-21T12:05:38

If we were to start allowing company logins in numbers, I suspect we'd really need to look at some kind of function to say what to do on the death of the company.

In liquidation

essuu on 2009-08-19T11:55:25

According to Companies House (the keeper of records for UK companies), Fotango Limited is in liquidation. Strictly speaking the account is an asset of the company and you would need to contact the liquidator to get permission to re-assign it (unless the PAUSE T&Cs allow you to re-assign stale accounts) but the code has been released to the public domain (within the bounds of the perl licence) so adding a co-maintainer shouldn't be a problem.

Re:In liquidation

tsee on 2009-08-19T12:14:24

Since PAUSE (and to a lesser extend CPAN) were created and being run by volunteers that provide a free service, I very much doubt that anybody has any legal handle on PAUSE accounts. The reason why us PAUSE admins are treading very carefully is because we're simply trying to "do the right thing" and accommodate everyone. That's not entirely unselfish: It would be a disaster if users (both owners of PAUSE accounts and "ordinary" CPAN users) lost trust in PAUSE and CPAN.

In the end, I believe, it comes down to the discretion of Jarkko or Andreas.

Of course, the copyright of the uploaded code is entirely unaffected. I believe that by knowingly uploading code to PAUSE, an author grants us the right to redistribute it. The one case where someone is able to force us to, for example, take down a module is if the uploader had no right to do so.

IANAL, of course.

Cheers,
Steffen

Some progress..

2shortplanks on 2009-08-21T07:37:39

So, just to keep people updated:

After getting suggestions from people on who to contact, I've sent emails to people in Fotango's parent company. They've responded positively, but said that people needed to make the final decision are on holiday until at least the end of the month.

Given that prompt response it seems the prudent thing to do now is wait for them to get back, thus sidestepping the need for any further debate over the right course of action.

Thanks again for everyone's help in this matter.