Using LLM backed codegen to falsely relicense from copyleft licensing like LGPL to anything resembling MIT/BSD style licensing isn't just laundering code - it's an active attack on the labour aspect of the free software movement. It is an attempt to undo forcing cooperation by using the existing copyright system, subverting the very commons which they plundered to create these tools.
This is why playing by the rules rarely gets you change.
I also think end users and past contributors of chardet are being actively cheated here. This is a new project masquerading as continuity. This actively erases all pre-7 contibutions and authorship to an LGPL codebase, and shouldn’t even be pretending to be a new release of the same library.
How is this not just vandalism, I do not know.
🏛️ BREAKING: Today, the US Supreme Court declined to rule that workslop created by AI systems can be copyrighted. :freesoftware: Question for the lawyers here: If a work (original or derived) is not copyrightable, is there any route for it to be releasable under a FOSS license? https://www.engadget.com/ai/the-supreme-court-doesnt-care-if-you-want-to-copyright-your-ai-generated-art-171849407.html #OpenSource #FreeSoftware #FOSS #FLOSS #AI #ArtificialIntelligence
The article about the issue in this subthread is now published: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2026/mar/04/scotus-deny-cert-dc-circuit-thaler-appeal-llm-ai/
To @maxine's larger point in the OP, #SFC is putting serious work in the next few months into issues related to #LLM-backed #AI agents and their impact and implications for #FOSS. Nothing beyond that to report at this very moment, as it's a work in progress, but please watch #SoftwareFreedom Conservancy's website for announcements in coming months.
No Serious Implications for FOSS from SCOTUS' DenialEarlier this week1, the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) denied certiorari (cert) in Thaler v. Perlmutter. Thaler contended that an image — generated by a Large Language Model (LLM)-backed Artificial Intelligence (AI) — deserved copyright registration. Since the U.S. Copyright Office refused to grant the registration, Thaler appealed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (DC Circuit). That Court affirmed the Copyright Office's decision. SCOTUS' denial of “cert” means they will not hear the case. Strictly speaking, this denial does not affirm the DC Circuit Court's ruling, but it does mean the DC Circuit decision stands.
maxine 🇵🇸
viq
Michael Downey 
Bradley M. Kühn 🏳️🌈