Clarify Cowsay licensing situation

[apjanke]

There are some questions about the exact state of the licensing situation for cowsay. And I think my documentation for it is currently a bit wrong, or at least incomplete. Sort this out.

Progress

Work is on the licentious branch. So far, it's just me doing some research and writing notes.

As of December 2024, I now think the situation boils down to "original cowsay was dual-licensed GPL 1+ and Artistic License, with maybe a few specific cows under different licenses, and third-party contributions to cowsay-org since 2016 are just GPLv3".

As of November 30, 2024, I re-licensed all my own contributions to Cowsay to expand the license grant to be "GNU GPL 1 or later or Artistic License 1.0" instead of just GPLv3. That's consistent with what I think the original licensing situation was, and gives good compatibility with future changes to the licensing or our understanding of it. I've started asking other contributors to do the same.

Added documentation about the licensing situation to main on 2024-11-30. The README and CONTRIBUTORS.md now say "GPLv1+ & Artistic" for licensing terms, and the GitHub repo page now shows "Unknown" for the license instead of GPL-3.0, so contributors will go read the details if curious.

TODO

• Ask Fedora about why daemon.cow is removed for a "licensing issue". Is it a FLOSS license/provenance problem, or a trademark issue (FreeBSD mascot), or something else?
  • Sent 'em an email 2024-12-01.

[apjanke]

I added license-related documentation in 65fa916 and 4aaec3a.

This includes changes to the main README.md and CONTRIBUTING.md saying this project, and contributions to it, are licensed under the broader "GPL 1.0+ and Artistic 1.0" terms. That will now be visible on the GitHub project page. GitHub now displays it as "Unknown" license in its auto-generated labeling, which is a bummer, but better than saying GPL-3.0, which I think would now be misleading.