I make no warranties, implied or otherwise, about the suitability of the software contained within CPAN. I shall not in any case be liable for special, incidental, consequential, indirect or other similar damages arising from the transfer, storage, or use of the material stored herein.
I maintain CPAN completely for free as a service to the Perl
community. What I do is just pull together various Perl resources of
the Internet. I do not meticulously inspect every file arriving to
CPAN. Of course I will be very interested to hear if some file
contains nasties like Trojan horses and/or virii, but I take no
responsibility for the contents of CPAN or what they might do. After
all, how could I protect you from yourself if you decide to do
system("rm -rf /") as root? Against stupidity even the
gods themselves contend in vain.
If you plan to do something commercial out of CPAN such as put it on a CD-ROM disk, stop right there and think for a moment. I cannot give you the permission. Larry Wall cannot give you the permission. There is no single entity on this planet that can give you the permission. Legally there is no other way than to ask separately from each and every author of all the separate pieces of software and documentation in CPAN. No, I do not maintain a list of these authors nor do I intend to. Nobody does and nobody can. I am not stopping you from making a CD-ROM, I am just reminding you.
No doubt these short documents raise more questions than they answer. Please do not hesitate to contact me and point out where I could do better.