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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John Francis 🇨🇦🦫🍁💪⬆️

@cwebber good times! 😅

It's going to be fun to see how the boundaries of "human produced work" are defined over time, but I expect it will work out in whatever way benefits the big money players in software and media.

Does this only apply to "AI"? What does that mean? If I have a machine generated background crowd or vapour in some frames of my $300M blockbuster movie, can I still copyright it?