No right to relicense this project

[a2mark]

Hi, I'm Mark Pilgrim. You may remember me from such classics as "Dive Into Python" and "Universal Character Encoding Detector." I am the original author of chardet. First off, I would like to thank the current maintainers and everyone who has contributed to and improved this project over the years. Truly a Free Software success story.

However, it has been brought to my attention that, in the release 7.0.0, the maintainers claim to have the right to “relicense” the project. They have no such right; doing so is an explicit violation of the LGPL. Licensed code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a "clean room" implementation). Adding a fancy code generator into the mix does not somehow grant them any additional rights.

I respectfully insist that they revert the project to its original license.

[schuelermine]

Is there a fork from before the AI-assisted “rewrite” happened?

[paulRbr]

Is there a fork from before the AI-assisted “rewrite” happened?

All versions before v7.0.0 are visible by tags in this repo. E.g. here's version 6.0.0

[asdf8dfafjk]

Legally Mark is right. Semantically it was Steve Ballmer who said GPL is cancer.

[wmealing]

You dont get the work horse, without having to clean the stable. Its the tradeoffs we make.

[jaens]

Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.

"...the Federal Circuit court reversed both decisions, holding that APIs are copyrightable in 2014..."

(That makes the relicensing an API-compatible "rewrite" without the copyright holder's permission likely illegal in the US unless it's fair use, which is how Google was "saved". This rewrite is very unlikely to meet all the requirements for fair use.)

[flexagoon]

@jaens IMO this has less to do with APIs and more with what a2mark originally mentioned - the rewrite is still heavily based on the original code, and as such is still a derivative work

[mitsuhiko]

(That makes the relicensing an API-compatible "rewrite" without the copyright holder's permission illegal in the US unless it's fair use, which is how Google was "saved".)

That is neither what the ruling said nor what would matter here. Google was very much within their rights the match a public API and the same would most likely be true for an API compatible rewrite of chardet.

If the current rewrite can be seen as a clean room implementation I cannot say. Chardet was already on the list of libraries I think should have an attempted clean room reimplementation, because of both performance and licensing reasons.

It’s very much within what should be possible by having an agent implement by just targeting inputs and outputs without setting the source.

So if this does not yet match that, it should be possible, and I think it should at least be seriously attempted.

[justinclift]

As reference info, this is the MIT license in this repo (ie the new license): https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/dc43ec8f95b74458effd38f9c076a540c6990049/LICENSE

[theronic]

@jaens,

"In April 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–2 decision that Google's use of the Java APIs served an organizing function and fell within the four factors of fair use, bypassing the question on the copyrightability of the APIs. The decision reversed the Federal Circuit ruling and remanded the case for further review."
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.

[justinclift]

Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant ...

On that note, should it be assumed (or confirmed?) that the chardet source code was part of the training data for the LLM(s) involved in the rewrite?

If it was, that could be extremely relevant.

[therealadityashankar]

It’s very much within what should be possible by having an agent implement by just targeting inputs and outputs without setting the source.

So if this does not yet match that, it should be possible, and I think it should at least be seriously attempted.

I have to admit this sounds like an argument to why licensing is useless altogether due to an agent always being able to reconstruct a project on the basis it's inputs and outputs, which may be true, but I think this opens the pathway to many more questions about the point of licensing in the first place

[jaens]

@theronic I literally mentioned that fair use saved Google.

The Supreme Court did not take a stance on API copyrightability so it's sane to conservatively assume that the example set by the Federal Court holds until proven otherwise.

If anybody thinks this is fair use, they could explain exactly how this meets the four factors considered in fair use.