CPAN: Disclaimer
CPAN makes no warranties, implied or otherwise, about the suitability of the software contained within CPAN. CPAN 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.
CPAN is maintained CPAN completely for free as a service to the Perl community. Files uploaded to CPAN are NOT manually inspected. Of course we will be very interested to hear if some file contains nasties like Trojan horses and/or virii, but CPAN takes no responsibility for the contents of CPAN or what they might do.
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. We 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, we do not maintain a list of these authors nor do we intend to. Nobody does and nobody can. We are not stopping you from making a CD-ROM, just reminding you.
No doubt these short documents raise more questions than they answer. Please do not hesitate to contact us and point out where we could do better.