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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 hours ago by cm0002@lemmings.world to c/opensource@programming.dev

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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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[–] Arghblarg@lemmy.ca 6 points 4 hours 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.

[–] RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world 6 points 6 hours ago

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

[–] ell1e@leminal.space 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours 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...