Christine Lemmer-WebberMar 5
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...

GitHub
Show threadChristine Lemmer-WebberMar 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

Show threadcyberiaMar 5
@cwebber Well, the maintainer's point was that this is "clean room", by which they mean Claude was not given the existing codebase as input. The counter argument is that the existing codebase almost certainly forms part of Claude's training data, so the claim of it being genuinely clean room is bogus. So to make your idea work, you'd have to use the proprietary codebase as training data, rather than prompt input.
Show threadcyberia
@cwebber and I suspect that if you made an LLM based on the specific code as training data, a court would probably rule differently to how they have ruled about LLM generated code in other cases. maybe.
Mar 5 at 4:05pmWeb