Simon WillisonMar 5
The chardet open source library relicensed from LGPL to MIT two days ago thanks to a Claude Code assisted "clean room" rewrite - but original author Mark Pilgrim is disputing that the way this was done justifies the change in license - my notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/5/chardet/
Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code?

Over the past few months it’s become clear that coding agents are extraordinarily good at building a weird version of a “clean room” implementation of code. The most famous version …

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@simon Obviously! The source code is: that code required to produce the binary. That code was LGPL. It doesn't matter how many algorithms, nor the nature of the algorithms, it goes through to become those 1s and 0s.

#law #lawfare #computerScience #intellectualProperty #licensing #FOSS #GNU #LGPL #MIT #code #softwareEngineering #LLM #codeWashing

Mar 5 at 8:26pmWeb