Mastodawn

A new twist in the "AI license laundering of chardet" story https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327

No right to relicense this project · Issue #327 · chardet/chardet

Hi, I'm Mark Pilgrim. You may remember me from such classics as "Dive Into Python" and "Universal Character Encoding Detector." I am the original author of chardet. First off, I would like to thank...

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Christine Lemmer-Webber Mar 5

But really, relicensing a GPL codebase to MIT is uninteresting.

Let's do the interesting one, which is: vibe code a "clean room" reimplementation of an entire proprietary codebase! After all, Microsoft released a "shared source" proprietary version of Windows. Now try seeing what happens if you run THAT through the "turn it into public domain" machine

Win-win outcome, no matter how it goes

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Christine Lemmer-Webber Mar 5

Winning option 1: yes, you can vibe code proprietary codebases into the public domain, allowing us to bootstrap proprietary codebases quickly

Winning option 2: stopping laundering of copyleft codebases

Either of these are interesting outcomes!

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Christine Lemmer-Webber Mar 5

I left a comment to that effect here https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4005721071

No right to relicense this project · Issue #327 · chardet/chardet

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Thommy

@cwebber that's exactly where my mind went to. Any time I've rewritten something that was in copyleft because I needed it copycenter or even with such inspiration, I wouldn't let myself even look at the original code. But it would be a net boon to OSS if the same rules apply to proprietary stuff. The bad situation would be if corporate lawyers effectively made it so that only their code is protected from such reimplementation.