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"No right to relicense this project" - on changing the license of Mark Pilgrim's chardet from LGPL to MIT after a vibe-coded rewrite (github.com)
submitted 7 months ago* by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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for those not familiar with Mark Pilgrim, he is/was a prolific author, blogger, and hacker who abruptly disappeared from the internet in 2011.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/968527

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[+] -8 points 7 months ago (1 child)

I think we may be mixing two different questions here.

The legal question is not whether an AI model might have seen the original code during training. The relevant question is whether the new implementation contains protected expression from the LGPL codebase.

At the moment, the available evidence points the other way:

reported similarity is extremely low (~0.04% average / ~1.29% max)

module structure and APIs differ

the detection pipeline appears to have been reimplemented

Solving the same problem (encoding detection) does not by itself make a work derivative.

Seems kind of fair. Codings has always been a bit of a wild west, are we going to start copyrighting concepts? The original repo wasn't used during the rewrite either.

I also prefer MIT to copy left in any case and I don't even think reverse engineering something and rewriting it is bad either. I don't dig the constant copyright bootlicking.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    If you truly enjoy free software and the right to modify, then you enjoy copy left.

    MIT is how you have your work "stolen" by people who hate freedoms and want to lock everything down.

    I really think everyone using copyleft licenses is the correct future. Licensing with MIT has become very popular, but I don't think it should be.

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