Open apjanke opened 2 weeks ago
Interesting. The Debian package copyright file says that the satanic, sodomized, and telebears cows were removed because they had no known license, not due to offensiveness.
$ cat copyright
Format: https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
Upstream-Name: cowsay
Upstream-Contact: Tony Monroe <tony@nog.net>
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20120527202447/http://www.nog.net/~tony/warez/cowsay.shtml
Comment: Files from upstream which had no known license have been removed
The files are:
.
kitty.cow
meow.cow
satanic.cow
small.cow
sodomized.cow
supermilker.cow
surgery.cow
telebears.cow
udder.cow
And then I see patches for those various Debian-only cows, with various licenses. Covers cows: apt, calvin, cock, duck, fox, gnu, kangaroo, pony, pony-smaller, snowman, suse. But apparently not: elephant
Files: debian/patches/apt_cow
Copyright: 2002 Steven Barker <scbarker@uiuc.edu>
License: GPL
[...]
Files: debian/patches/calvin_cow debian/patches/cock_cow
Copyright: 2006 Krishna Kumar <krish.kumar@gmail.com>
License: COWSAY
[...]
Files: debian/patches/duck_cow
Copyright: 1999 Gürkan Sengün <gurkan@phys.ethz.ch>
License: COWSAY
Need to get the packaging file, and download the exact source distribution they're using, to see if elephant etc. are covered by those other files like *.
That copyright text also indicates that some cow files from the main cowsay distribution are covered under different licenses. May be an issue with multi-contributor work in the original cowsay project. Based on my reading, the license wasn't changed from COWSAY to GPLv3 until the cowsay 3.04 release in 2016 when it was posted to GitHub, in a new commit by Tony.
There's no formal contributor agreement or copyright assignment in the cowsay documentation, so I don't know if that re-licensing actually works for the cow files contributed by other authors besides Tony. We may want to change the copyright info in this distribution to be finer grained and reflect that, and in a way that makes it easy for Debian and other packagers to pick it up and incorporate it. And maybe remove the no-license-info files like Debian does.
I checked our current cows against the original 3.04 posting. It's as expected - just the NSFW and broken .pm cows removed, some new cows added, and the file extension on mech-and-cow fixed.
[cowsay] $ diff cows-3.04-orig.txt cows-3.04-my-import.txt
[cowsay] $ diff cows-3.04-orig.txt cows-current.txt
1,7c1
< DragonAndCow.pm
< Example.pm
< Frogs.pm
< MechAndCow.pm
< Stegosaurus.pm
< TextBalloon.pm
< TuxStab.pm
---
> alpaca.cow
14a9
> cupcake.cow
22a18
> fox.cow
29a26
> llama.cow
31c28
< mech-and-cow
---
> mech-and-cow.cow
38d34
< satanic.cow
42d37
< sodomized.cow
47d41
< telebears.cow
[cowsay] $
And the diff against the 3.03 dist tarball (downloaded from Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, sha ) is smaller, and as expected. (The .pm cows were added in the lat, abortive 3.04 development work, I think.)
[cowsay] $ diff cows-3.03-dist.txt cows-current.txt
0a1
> alpaca.cow
1a3
> blowfish.cow
6a9
> cupcake.cow
14a18
> fox.cow
21a26
> llama.cow
23c28
< mech-and-cow
---
> mech-and-cow.cow
30d34
< satanic.cow
34d37
< sodomized.cow
39d41
< telebears.cow
[cowsay] $
I emailed some of the openSUSE cowsay package maintainers about the chami chameleon cow; we'll see what they have to say about upstreaming it.
The current Debian cowsay package, based on classic cowsay 3.03, has some cows that are not in cowsay-org's current cows, and also don't seem to be in the original 3.03/3.04 repo that Tony posted. Let's see if we can get those in to our herd.
(As noted in this comment on the "NSFW" ticket.)
TODO
The situation
On my Debian 12 box:
Compared to our current cows:
References