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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 8 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[+] -51 points 8 months ago (18 children)

Well, I do not get his point, the code has been completely rewritten. Not to mention that the new license is much better than the old one.

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  • [–] 49 points 8 months ago (13 children)

    If the llm they used was trained on the original code, the result was not legally rewritten. To change licensing without buy in from all original authors, the new code must be fully original from spec. Ignoring the legal definitions for convenience opens the door for corporations to steal open source and copyleft materials and strip away the licensing requirements.

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  • [+] -38 points 8 months ago (12 children)

    That's a wild claim you're making. So far, it looks like the code is completely new, and for this case, it doesn't really matter where it comes from. New code - new license.

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago (8 children)

    okay, you have to be able to prove the LLM didn't learn off of the original source material. Because if it is, its dertivitve work, making it subject to LGPL.

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  • [+] -10 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    Well, I do not have to, the burden of proof lies on the person making the claim.

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    That's valid in a debate, but not quite how courts work?

    I'm not a lawyer, just someone petty enough to read laws.

    The discovery requests in the law suit will require yo turn over all training data. From there, it will be up to the AI makers to prove that it wasn't used, if it was fed into training data. Which if it was open source, almost certainly was.

    That as side.

    Your making an equal claim that it wasn't. With an equal amount of proof. So what your sating bears as much weight as the other person.

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  • [–] -2 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    I have not made any claims, and I am not affiliated with this project in any way. I don't know how this could be dealt with in court, or whether anyone will even bother with it.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    You claim

    https://vger.to/lemmy.ml/comment/24346212

    That its completlt rewritten, with the implication that its not using the project as input.

    So yes, you do should back that up

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    This is a vast downgrade; stripping the GPL is an obvious attempt at nuking open source by bad faith actors. See what's happening with AOSP, which would be impossible under GPL.

    The day GPL stops being used is the day every major tech company will start slowly but surely closing their code down until open source is completely dead

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    Yeah, personally I don't really like the GPL* (for stuff that isn't actively of interest to companies), but this kind of stripping the GPL from an existing project is just, gross. Definitely seems like an active attempt to nuke it and take it over.

    (*because I like it when other open source people can use a given piece of code e.g. I wrote, and I'm not particularly picky about whether they agree with me on what specific form of open source is best; wanna use my MIT or public domain code in a GPL project? go for it!)

    (s/open source/free software/g if you're one of the "open source isn't REAL FREE SOFTWARE!!!" people; I use the terms interchangeably, bite me)

    (also I get using the GPL for stuff that companies would actively want to take over. Like, apparently, this project.)

    -- Frost

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  • [–] -3 points 8 months ago

    What is happening with AOSP has nothing to do with the license. This project is not being developed by the community, but by Google for Google's money, and Google can do whatever it wants with it. It's silly to be offended by this. Anyone who is dissatisfied can fork the project and do whatever they want with it, if they can manage *(well, no, without Google's resources, this is of course unrealistic).

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