Setting aside the legal questions, what a nasty thing to do. I would expect to see this kind of move from some big corpo, not an OSS maintainer. This feels like it runs counter to the whole open source ethos and undermines the idea that authorship means anything anymore.
No right to relicense this project
191–200 of 388 posts
Re: No right to relicense this project
#192Huh, 7e25bf4 was a big commit. 2,305 files changed +0 -546871 lines changed https://github.com/chardet/chardet/commit/7e25bf40bb4ae68848...
Impossible to code inspect and verify. Someone else commented 'smells like a supply chain attack' and while I'm sure it's not intended to be, there is no way to verify. And who believes, in half a million lines of code, no bugs have been introduced?
Re: No right to relicense this project
#193As part of my consulting, i've stumbled upon this issue in a commercial context. A SaaS company who has the mobile apps of their platform open source approached me with the following concern. One of their engineers was able to recreate their platform by letting Claude Code reverse engineer their Apps and the Web-Frontend, creating an API-compatible backend that is functionally identical. Took him a week after work. I…
If your backend is trivial enough to be implemented by a large language model, what value are you providing? I know it's a provoking question but that answers why a competitor is not a competitor.
I suspect you're underestimating the capabilities of today's LLMs.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#194It's not clear at all why the current maintainers wanted/needed this re-licensing. I guess that their employee, Monarch Money, wants to use derivative work in their application without releasing the changes? It was already LGPL, perfect for a library, not GPL.
Python wouldn't take LGPL code in the standard library. And Dan Blanchard imagined more people would want to work on it.[1]
[1] https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4...
Re: No right to relicense this project
#195I believe that Pilgrim here does not understand very well how copyright works: > Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code This is simply not true. The reason why the "clean room" concept exists is precisely since actually the law recognizes that independent implementations ARE possibile. The "clean room" thing is a trick to make the litig…
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Re: No right to relicense this project
#196I believe that Pilgrim here does not understand very well how copyright works: > Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code This is simply not true. The reason why the "clean room" concept exists is precisely since actually the law recognizes that independent implementations ARE possibile. The "clean room" thing is a trick to make the litig…
If you let an LLM merely rephrase the codebase, that's like letting it rephrase the Harry Potter novels. Which, I'm pretty sure, would still be considered a copy under copyright law, not an original work, despite not copying any text verbatim.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Insider Knowledge" is not relevant for copyright law. That is more in the space of patent law then copyright law. On the contrary. Except for discussions about punitive damages and so on, insider knowledge or lack thereof is completely irrelevant to patent law. If company A has a patent on something, they can assert said patent against company B regardless of whether any person in company B had ever seen or heard…
> In contrast, for copyright the right is intrinsically tied to the origin of a work. If you create a digital image that is entirely identical at the pixel level with a copyrighted work, and you can prove that you had never seen that original copyrighted work and you created your image completely independently, then you have not broken anyone's copyright and are free to sell copies of your own work. This is not true.…
This has no relation to what I was saying. Taking a photo of a copyrighted work is a method for creating a copy of said work using a mechanical device, so it is of course covered by copyright (whether buildings or light shows fall under copyright is an irrelevant detail).
What I'm saying is that if you, say, create an image of a red oval in MS Paint, you have copyright over said image. If 2 years later I create an identical image myself having never seen your image, I also have copyright over my image - despite it being identical to your image, I have every right to sell copies of my image, and even to sue someone who distributes copies of my image without my permission (but not if they're distributing copies of your image).
But if I had seen your image of a red oval before I created mine, it's basically impossible for me to prove that I created my own image out of my own creativity, and I didn't just copy yours. So, if you were to sue me for copyright infringement, I would almost certainly lose in front of any reasonable jury.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#198Interesting.
While I am obviously Team GPL and not team "I 'rewrote' this with AI so now it's mine", I'm team anti-fork, and definitely not team 'Chardet'.
Forking should be a last resort, one better option is to yeet the thing entirely.
And chardet lends itself perfectly for this, using chardet is a sign of an issue and low craftmanship, either by the developer using chardet, or the developer that failed to signal the encoding of their text. (See Joel Spolsky's "The absolute minimum every developer should know about character encoding") (And let's be honest, it's probably the developers problem, not everything is someone else's fault.)
Just uninstall this thing where you can, and avoid installing it always, because you always can.
You know I'm right. I will not be replying to copium
Re: No right to relicense this project
#199On a side note, it is interesting to see Mark Pilgrim rise from the "dead": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pilgrim#%22Disappearance%...
His Python books, although a bit dated, are something I still recommend to new Python programmers.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#200I believe that Pilgrim here does not understand very well how copyright works: > Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code This is simply not true. The reason why the "clean room" concept exists is precisely since actually the law recognizes that independent implementations ARE possibile. The "clean room" thing is a trick to make the litig…
Ok sure, in the alternative, here's the argument:
The AI was trained with the code, so the complete rewrite is tainted and not a clean room. I can't believe this would need spelling out.