Licenses are cancer and the enemy of opensource.
There would be no open source without the gpl
The GPL was historically of course a counter-reaction to copyrightability of code. Hence "copyleft" etc.
No right to relicense this project
251–260 of 388 posts
Re: No right to relicense this project
#252Look, forget the details, step back and consider the implications of the principle.
Someone should not be able to write a semi-common core utility, provide it as a public good, abandon it for over a decade, and yet continue to hold the rest of the world hostage just because of provenance. That’s a trap and it’s not in any public interest.
The true value of these things only comes from use. The extreme positions for ideals might be nice at times, but for example we still don’t have public access to printer firmware. Most of this ideology has failed in key originating goals and continues to cause headaches.
If we’re going to share, share. If you don’t want to share, don’t. But let’s not setup terminal traps, no one benefits from that.
If we flip this back around though, shouldn’t this all be MPL and Netscape communications? (Edit: turns out they had an argument about that in the past on their own issue tracker: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/36)
Re: No right to relicense this project
#253As 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…
> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"
I have been thinking about this a lot lately, as someone launching a niche b2b SaaS. The unfortunate conclusion that I have come to is: have more capital than anyone for distribution.
Is there any other answer to this? I hope so, as we are not in the well-capitalized category, but we have friendly user traction. I think the only possible way to succeed is to quietly secure some big contracts.
I had been hoping to bootstrap, but how can we in this new "code is cheap" world? I know it's always been like this, but it is even worse now, isn't it?
Re: No right to relicense this project
#254The even more concerning news to me is that chardet 7.0 is now vibe coded AI slop, as documented in the PR for the rewrite [1]:
> I put this together using Claude Code with Opus 4.6 with the amazing https://github.com/obra/superpowers plugin in less than a week. It took a fair amount of iteration to get it dialed in quite like I wanted, but it took a project I had been putting off for many years and made it take ~4 days.
Given the amount of changes I seriously doubt that this re-implementation has been reviewed properly and I wonder how this is going to be maintainable going forward.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#255Look, forget the details, step back and consider the implications of the principle. Someone should not be able to write a semi-common core utility, provide it as a public good, abandon it for over a decade, and yet continue to hold the rest of the world hostage just because of provenance. That’s a trap and it’s not in any public interest. The true value of these things only comes from use. The extreme positions for i…
LGPL means "gift to the world". The license ensures that any modification/improvements stay a gift to the world.
People not being okay with having to share their improvements not being able to use the software is by design.
I don't get how you get from there to some sinister hostage taking situation.
Also everyone that contributes to the previous LGPL verison probably contributed under LGPL only, so it is now just one guy...
Re: No right to relicense this project
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is a bit too broad. There are actually three possible cases. When there is similar code, the only defense possible to prove that you have not copied the original is to show that your process is a clean room re-implementation. If the code is completely different, then clean room or not is indeed irrelevant. The only way the author can claim that you violated their copyright despite no apparent similarity…
> When there is similar code, the only defense possible to prove that you have not copied the original is to show that your process is a clean room re-implementation. Yes, but you do not have to prove that you haven’t copied the original; you have to prove you didn’t infringe copyright. For that there are other possible defenses, for example: - fair use - claiming the copied part doesn’t require creativity - arguing…
> there’s jurisdiction that says AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted
The headline was misleading. The courts said what Thaler could have copyrighted was a complicated question they ignored because he said he was not the author.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#257Look, forget the details, step back and consider the implications of the principle. Someone should not be able to write a semi-common core utility, provide it as a public good, abandon it for over a decade, and yet continue to hold the rest of the world hostage just because of provenance. That’s a trap and it’s not in any public interest. The true value of these things only comes from use. The extreme positions for i…
LGPL means "gift to the world". The license ensures that any modification/improvements stay a gift to the world. People not being okay with having to share their improvements not being able to use the software is by design. I don't get how you get from there to some sinister hostage taking situation. Also everyone that contributes to the previous LGPL verison probably contributed under LGPL only, so it is now just on…
LGPL applies to the LGPL’d code, not to every piece of code someone might add to the repository or under the same name implicitly.
The claim being made is that because some prior implementation was licensed one way, all other implementations must also be licensed as such.
AIUI the code has provenance in Netscape, prior to the chardet library, and the Netscape code has provenance in academic literature.
Now the question of what constitutes a rewrite is complex, and maybe somewhat more complex with the AI involvement, but if we take the current maintainers story as honest they almost certainly passed the bar of independence for the code.
Re: No right to relicense this project
#258A comment from 2021: > Unfortunately, because the code that chardet was originally based on was LGPL, we don't really have a way to relicense it. Believe me, if we could, I would. There was talk of chardet being added to the standard library, and that was deemed impossible because of being unable to change the license. So the person that did the rewrite knew this was a dive into dangerous water. That's so disrespectf…
[flagged]
Re: No right to relicense this project
#259Look, forget the details, step back and consider the implications of the principle. Someone should not be able to write a semi-common core utility, provide it as a public good, abandon it for over a decade, and yet continue to hold the rest of the world hostage just because of provenance. That’s a trap and it’s not in any public interest. The true value of these things only comes from use. The extreme positions for i…
Fork it?
Re: No right to relicense this project
#260The copyright argument is a sidetrack both in the PR comment thread and here. The issue opened claims the new code is based on the old code, and therefore derivative, and therefore must be offered in a modified version of the source code under the previous license, LGPL. The complaint is the maintainers violated the terms of LGPL, that they must prove no derivation from the original code to legally claim this is a le…
It's the same project/name, with a version bump.