"No right to relicense this project" - on changing the license of Mark Pilgrim's chardet from LGPL to MIT after a vibe-coded rewrite
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/44059967
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: lemmy.bestiver.se/post/968527
HN comments
No right to relicense this project
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...a2mark (GitHub)
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hobata
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •zogrewaste
in reply to hobata • • •hobata
in reply to zogrewaste • • •mina86
in reply to hobata • • •wholookshere
in reply to hobata • • •hobata
in reply to wholookshere • • •wholookshere
in reply to hobata • • •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.
hobata
in reply to wholookshere • • •wholookshere
in reply to hobata • • •You claim
vger.to/lemmy.ml/comment/24346…
That its completlt rewritten, with the implication that its not using the project as input.
So yes, you do should back that up
hobata
in reply to wholookshere • • •wholookshere
in reply to hobata • • •hobata
in reply to wholookshere • • •wholookshere
in reply to hobata • • •redrum
in reply to wholookshere • • •eleijeep
in reply to hobata • • •copying a design by reverse engineering and then recreating it without infringing any of the copyrights associated with the original design
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Treczoks
in reply to hobata • • •CommanderCloon
in reply to hobata • • •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
hobata
in reply to CommanderCloon • • •forestbeasts
in reply to CommanderCloon • • •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
sacredbirdman
in reply to hobata • • •Goodlucksil
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •thatonecoder
in reply to Goodlucksil • • •hobata
in reply to Goodlucksil • • •tabular
in reply to hobata • • •hobata
in reply to tabular • • •vapeloki
in reply to hobata • • •hobata
in reply to vapeloki • • •cheesemoo
in reply to hobata • • •tabular
in reply to cheesemoo • • •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.
AHemlocksLie
in reply to hobata • • •hobata
in reply to AHemlocksLie • • •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.
vapeloki
in reply to hobata • • •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.
hobata
in reply to vapeloki • • •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.
vapeloki
in reply to hobata • • •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.
hobata
in reply to vapeloki • • •I have no problem with it.
vapeloki
in reply to hobata • • •hobata
in reply to vapeloki • • •vapeloki
in reply to hobata • • •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
hobata
in reply to vapeloki • • •vapeloki
in reply to hobata • • •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.
hobata
in reply to vapeloki • • •I agree at the point, that everyone should use that license he like.
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.
vapeloki
in reply to hobata • • •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.
AHemlocksLie
in reply to hobata • • •vapeloki
in reply to hobata • • •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?
hobata
in reply to vapeloki • • •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 hope you are old enough to agree with me that TurboVision was fucking awesome.
All the hate on you. No, no, joking, I appreciate your work. gcc is a mess, I know.
A7thStone
in reply to hobata • • •hobata
in reply to A7thStone • • •Semperverus
in reply to hobata • • •tabular
in reply to hobata • • •anachronist
in reply to Goodlucksil • • •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.
Sanctus
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •underisk
in reply to Sanctus • • •Sanctus
in reply to underisk • • •sem
in reply to Arthur Besse • • •Arthur Besse
in reply to sem • • •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 👀chardet/README.md at 772939d9f58ebb085befcbf75e68cbee4916d3e0 · chardet/chardet
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