Does using the old version’s tests to create a new version make it a derivative work? That’s certainly some pretty tight coupling.
No right to relicense this project
201–210 of 388 posts
Re: No right to relicense this project
#202It'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...
That take and the link within it to https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/36 which is from 2014 (!!) and revived in 2021 (!) make me think now that Dan Blanchard is in good faith, but still acted in a naive manner. Rewriting from "scratch" with Claude Code and basically taking over the project by changing the license, all in one single pull request, well... it's not going to end well on the public relations side.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#203Wow that's hot. I was not aware that you need to be "untainted" by the original LGPL code. This could mean that... All AI generated code is tainted with GPL/LGPL because the LLMs might have been taught with it
"Taint" requires that the code is demonstratably derivative from the *GPL licensed work. This is actually harder standard than some people think. The absolute clean room approaches in USA are there because they help short circuit a long lawsuit where a bigger corp can drag forever until you're broken.
It's harder than some people think, but the author does a lot of the work when he names the resulting artifact "chardet v7.0.0". If I thought I was writing the kind of arms-length reimplementation that's required, I would never put it into the versioning scheme of the original, come on.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#204On 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.
Let's see how much time it takes for the Wikipedia page to mention the "a2mark" GitHub user :)
(I can hear a "challenge accepted" from some random HNer already)
Re: No right to relicense this project
#205“Mr Teacher, how many words do I have to change after copy pasting wikipedia so its not plagiarism?” has grown up and entered the workforce. Pin your dependency versions people! With hashes at this point, cant trust anybody out here.
There's a subtext in your point that I want to expand on. Tech people, particularly engineers, tend to make a fundamental error when dealing with the law that almost always causes them to make wrong conclusions. And that error is that they look for technical compliance when so much of the law is subjective and holistic . An example I like to use is people who do something illegal on the Internet and then use the argu…
> And that error is that they look for technical compliance when so much of the law is subjective and holistic.
I know it sounds like an oversimplification, but "got off on a technicality" is a common thing among the well-connected and well-heeled. Sure, us nerds probably focus too much on the "technicality" part, since we are by definition technical, but the rest is wishy-washy, unfair BS as far as many of our brains work much of the time.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#206Does anyone understand the intent behind the changed license on the package, why are the current maintainers trying to do it in the first place? What's actually going on?
Re: No right to relicense this project
#207I 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…
Neither does the maintainer that claims a mechanical test of structural similarities can prove anything either waybwith regard to whether legally it is a derivative work (or even a mechnaical copy without the requisite new creative work to be a derivative work.)
And then Pilgrim is again wrong by saying that the use of Claude definitively makes it a derivative work because of the inability to prove it the work in question did not influence the neurons involved.
It is all dueling lay misreadings of copyright law, but it is also an area where the actual specific applicable law, on any level specific enough to cleanly apply, isn’t all that clear.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#208I 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…
I'm with you here, but I see another problem.
The expected functionality of chardet (detect the unicode encoding) is kind of fixed - apart from edge cases and new additions to unicode, you'd expect the original and new implementations to largely pass the same tests, and have a lot of similar code such as for "does this start with a BOM".
The fact that the JPlag shows such a low %overlap for an implementation of "the same interface" is convincing evidence for me that it's not just plagiarised.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#209I 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.
This is interesting and I'm not sure what to make of it. Devil's advocate: the person operating the AI also was "trained with the code," is that materially different from them writing it by hand vs. assisted by an LLM? Honestly asking, I hadn't considered this angle before.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#210I 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.
Reread the parent: clean room is not required.