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

One of the commentors in there claims that Claude will straight give you struct sk_buffer. I dont have access to Claude but I vomited and went to chatgpt and it said it was copyrighted and couldnt give it to me. I know we hate AI, but ir changes so fast make sure your info is right. We cant take them down with falsehoods, even if they are freshly made false. If anyone has Claude and can test let me know.

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  • [–] 20 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    You can ask the LLM the same question a hundred times and it might not give you the same answer it gave someone else. The way it responds is a combination of random chance and the language used to ask the question.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    I used whatever free tokens I had asking and every time it said it was a copyright violation in different ways. Make of that what you will but dont underestimate these oligarchs. They're weaving past, present, and future into the biggest ball of shit ever created and it rolls in their favor.

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    • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (29 children)

    Isn't the LGPL supposed to be relicensable as opposed to GPL's share-alike?

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    No, LGPL just allows linking to differently-licensed software.

    Basically linking copies some code from the library into the program that uses it, making any linked software a derivative work.

    Sellers of proprietary software libraries give permission for this specific type of linking in their license. LGPL gives the same permission to people who are otherwise following the GPL. LGPL used to be called the "library-GPL" because it is the GPL plus permission to use the library linking mechanism.

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  • [+] -27 points 8 months ago (26 children)

    nope, here *GPL acts like cancer, once it touches something, it remains *GPL until the last bit of it is still there.

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  • [–] 34 points 8 months ago (25 children)

    Cancer is a bad analogy. It's more like antibodies against non-free bactetia :)

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  • [+] -13 points 8 months ago (24 children)

    I have a completely different view of what free means. xGPL are restrictive and sticky.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago* (22 children)

    Ok, maybe explain the restrictions that offend you so much?

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  • [+] -7 points 8 months ago (21 children)

    GPL licenses are straight-up cancer, they force every derivative or linked project to adopt their viral copyleft rules, nuking proprietary reuse or easy mixing with other codebases, while a weird GPL cult preaches it as the one true path to "openness" and "freedom". As someone who codes purely for fun, I like the dead-simple clarity of MIT and BSD: just keep the notice and license text, then do whatever the hell you want. No GPL bullshit or compliance headaches for me, permissive licenses like these keep my sanity intact.

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

    GPL is especially popular with people who don't want their labor of love to become a source of free labor for corporations who will tweak it, close the source, directly profit off it, and never donate or contribute patches. For them, it's an antiparasitic license.

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  • [–] -5 points 8 months ago (16 children)

    I've heard that "corporate parasite" argument way too often, but it's massively overrated. Open Source allows selling anyway, MIT, BSD and GPL all do. If someone makes smart changes and lives off it, that's awesome, not reprehensible!

    GPL only forces source disclosure when distributing binaries, not for every damn thing – imagine you land a juicy company contract: you tweak a GPL work, deliver the binaries, and only have to hand the modified source TO THAT COMPANY, NOT the whole world! That's why AGPL fanatics had to invent their SaaS trap. For me as a hobby coder, GPLs are just pointless headaches instead of real freedom.

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

    This is naive. Very naive.

    We would not have such a huge Linux infrastructure and support for all those different components without GPL.

    Every modern car uses Linux. I repeat, one of the most locked down industries uses Linux on custom hardware on millions of cars.

    Indeed, very limiting.

    Or, gcc, the Compiler everybody uses to build Linux stuff and the kernel? This is a direct GNU project. Without GPL and the requirements to provide changes, we would have thousands of gcc based, closed source compilers. Most likely expensive to, to build optimized arm code and other stuff.

    But, feel free to protest the usage of GPL by not using any GPL licensed software.

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  • [–] -2 points 8 months ago (12 children)

    It's not naive – naive is believing Linux' success comes only from GPL. That's ridiculous. Windows sells like crazy too, does that make its license the nonplusultra?

    Linux booms because of Open Source (not just GPL), sponsoring (IBM, RedHat), thousands of volunteers, and pure luck. Without GPL? Sure, some BSD-derivative would've eaten that niche.

    GCC? Without GPL we'd have more compilers – not just one monopolist. You're confusing protection with innovation death.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    GCC? Without GPL we'd have more compilers – not just one monopolist. You're confusing protection with innovation death.

    This one is so stupid, I had to think how to respond.

    Why? What prevents anybody to implement a new Compiler, looking at LLVM ... ?

    What we would have are closed source gcc forks, that is not freedom. This is the opposite.

    I am old enough to remember buying a fucking Borland license

    I work on gcc code, I know how ugly, historic in parts and confusing the Codebase can be. But I also know why. LLVM has no such legacy, and this is a good thing. I believe some day LLVM will replace gcc because of that. And LLVM uses Apache 2.0.

    So, what exactly was your argument here?

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago*

    So, what exactly was your argument here?

    Duno, you tried to convince me that the xGPL restrictions are only for my benefit. I strongly disagree with that opinion, that's all. And I do not really care about argument, if something is used more often, then it's best suited for me. I avoid to contribute to GPL projects and prefer some with MIT or BSD licenses.

    I am old enough to remember buying a fucking Borland license

    I hope you are old enough to agree with me that TurboVision was fucking awesome.

    I work on gcc code

    All the hate on you. No, no, joking, I appreciate your work. gcc is a mess, I know.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (9 children)

    Look at the number of MIT projects with such founding and contributions. Compare them to copy left projects.

    What you will find is, that copy left projects have far more backing, financial support and contributions.

    There are studies on this...

    Qnd to keep Microsoft as an example. If the kernel would be permissive, what would Microsoft stop from using it, adding some property stuff on it and use their monopoly to force those feature everywhere.

    Now they have taken the work of thousands of contributors and take all the money.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (8 children)

    Now they have taken the work of thousands of contributors and take all the money.

    I have no problem with it.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (7 children)

    Did you contribute to the kernel? Because, I for sure have a problem with it. And I did contribute.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (6 children)

    Well at first, nice that we have a kernel developer here, it's not so easy to get your code into. And second, nope, I do not contributed to the kernel. I once wrote a module for educational purposes a long long time ago. Then FUSE came along and it helped me to solve the task with "more comfort".

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

    I did contribute once. And it was a pain. 20 lines of code but hours of work, Mailinglists, feedback, ...

    Don't het me wrong , it was fun. But would I have done the same for BSD, so that apple could use this? Hell no

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (4 children)

    Perhaps this is our fundamental difference. I write code, solve my small task and have fun by doing it. If someone can get something of it, it's twice as nice.

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

    And that's fine. And everybody should license his code as he likes.

    But my point stands. String copyleft is important.

    That does not mean that LGPL is always a good idea, and charted is a good example, as the python stdlib is MIT licensed, and therefore an LGPL charted has no chance of getting accepted.

    Btw, the easiest first step would have been: mail every contributor (there are not that many in that case) that provided more then hast some minor fixes and ask for permission. That is a valid way to change the license.

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

    I agree at the point, that everyone should use that license he like.

    Btw, the easiest first step would have been: mail every contributor (there are not that many in that case) that provided more then hast some minor fixes and ask for permission. That is a valid way to change the license.

    No, I think, that would not work this way, you have to ask every contributor, no matter how big the influence was. And everyone must agree unanimously. It's almost an impossible task.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    I agree regarding consesus. Unlikely, but: heaving major contributions greenlighted and only replace parts of the code are fat note feasible.

    No communication happened to my understanding at any point with any contributor.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    You don't need it to be unanimous, but if it's not unanimous, you have to rewrite the parts from people who refused or can't be contacted. If their sum contributions aren't too big, it can be feasible but a lot of work. If too many or if key contributors refuse, the work can scale exponentially.

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    That's... The point of the GPL licenses, to preserve copyleft. I also prefer the simplicity of the MIT license for my own works, but I respect the copyleft ideals.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    If it's all your own work then a license is purely for others to follow. MIT and GPL license can be just as simple as including a textfile of that license in the project.

    Ideally one includes a header in each code file to ensure people just looking at that file (without project context) know the license.

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    • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    So no one is going to say what chardet is, huh.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 8 months ago*

    It's a library for detecting which character encoding a string is encoded with.

    Here are the docs for the vibe-coded rewrite, and here is the version before it.

    The new vibe-coded version also adds language detection; it isn't clear to me why the current version of the readme shows it classifying the string "It’s a lovely day — let’s grab coffee." as Spanish with 99% confidence, without any comment in the docs about that being a misclassification, but I guess that if the LLM-authored program says it is then that must be one of those phrases that looks the same in Spanish as in English 👀

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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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    • 8 comments in c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 37 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    US courts have already ruled that AI generated works cannot be copyrighted, so yeah, if you vibecode something, it is not yours to license.

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

    Yeah. Relicensing it to MIT is really weird. Should either be Public Domain, or LGPL 😁

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    • [–] 5 points 8 months ago

    Trust the Flask guy to be in favour of this.

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    [+] -8 points 8 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 8 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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    • 4 comments in c/opensource@lemmy.ml view that post
    [–] 46 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    The AI-rewrite should be considered a derivative, & therefore subject to the parent-license, I believe.

    Except that AI doesn't have any right to copyright, & therefore to licensing.

    Which means that it's just an illegal derivative made by a tool.

    _ /\ _

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

    Not sure why downvoted, this is the correct take

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago

    "Not sure why downvoted"

    Many find "me" unacceptable/offensive.

    Downvoting me is fine: it makes them happy, & I don't value such "social-validation" delusion.

    They're making the world be more the way they want!

    Isn't that worth something?

    Integrity's worth more to me than "friends", so human-"reality" & I are on divergant-paths..

    My continuum/soul won't be getting caught in this-world again, if I succeed.

      ( :

    _ /\ _

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    • 3 comments in c/opensource@programming.dev view that post
    [–] 13 points 8 months ago

    If it was indeed a full rewrite via AI, committing it to the same repo, with the same project name, only an incremented major version and a license change -- seems to be an effort at co-opting the previous LGPL project's name and visibility by the current maintainer and serves to erase (however large or small) the work of previous contributors.

    Even if it truly is a 'clean-room' re-implementation, it should be called 'chardet-ng' or something to distinguish it from the original.

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    [–] 6 points 8 months ago

    Utterly insane to change the license and not realize it's still a derivative product, especially when it has the same name!

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    [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    I wouldn't be surprised if the potential problem wasn't limited to the original chardet alone, regarding what might be affected by this rewrite allegedly having silently relicensed code...

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