Salvatore Sanfilippo (@antirez) and Armin Ronacher (@mitsuhiko) both argue that #AI reimplementation of #copyleft libraries is fine. Their legal reasoning might be correct. That's not the point.

Legal and legitimate are different things—and both pieces quietly assume otherwise.

https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/legal-vs-legitimate/

#GPL #LGPL #license #opensource #freesoftware

Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

Last week, Dan Blanchard, the maintainer of chardet—a Python library for detecting text encodings used by roughly 130 million projects a month— released a new…

Hong Minhee on Things
最近(최근) chardet의 MIT 리라이선싱과 關聯(관련)해서 Redis의 antirez와 Flask의 Armin Ronacher(一名(일명) mitsuhiko)가 이를 擁護(옹호)하는 글을 썼는데, 그에 對(대)한 나름대로의 反論(반론)을 써 봤습니다: 〈合法(합법)이면 公正(공정)한가: AI 再具顯(재구현)과 카피레프트의 侵蝕(침식)〉(한글).
Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

Last week, Dan Blanchard, the maintainer of chardet—a Python library for detecting text encodings used by roughly 130 million projects a month— released a new…

Hong Minhee on Things

chardetのMITへの再ライセンスをめぐって、RedisのantirezとFlaskのArmin Ronacher(通称 mitsuhiko)がそれを擁護する文章を書いていたので、自分なりの反論を書いてみました。

https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/legal-vs-legitimate/index.ja.html

Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

Last week, Dan Blanchard, the maintainer of chardet—a Python library for detecting text encodings used by roughly 130 million projects a month— released a new…

Hong Minhee on Things
@hongminhee 잘 읽었습니다. 이 부분이 인상적이었습니다. "GPL의 역사는 새로운 착취 방식이 등장할 때마다 법적 도구가 진화해 온 역사다. "
@hyaniner 읽어주셔서 고맙습니다!

@hongminhee The moral ambit of LLM users can be concluded with the sentence "there is an obvious moral question here, but that isn't necessarily what I'm interested in" from what I've gathered.

I've seen people getting excited by what they perceive as copyright being no longer applicable because if companies can ingest FOSS code and make it proprietary, the commons can apparently do the same and that seems to miss the asymmetry of power. An individual like Aaron Swartz can still be mentally harassed to the point where he kills himself for violating copyright in the age of LLMs but there will never be equivalent consequences for Meta for pirating TBs of books.