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Relicensing with AI-assisted rewrite (tuananh.net)

submitted 2 months ago by codeinabox@programming.dev to c/opensource@programming.dev

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In the world of open source, relicensing is notoriously difficult. It usually requires the unanimous consent of every person who has ever contributed a line of code, a feat nearly impossible for legacy projects. chardet , a Python character encoding detector used by requests and many others, has sat in that tension for years: as a port of Mozilla’s C++ code it was bound to the LGPL, making it a gray area for corporate users and a headache for its most famous consumer.

Recently the maintainers used Claude Code to rewrite the whole codebase and release v7.0.0 , relicensing from LGPL to MIT in the process. The original author, a2mark , saw this as a potential GPL violation

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[–] RmDebArc_5@feddit.org 6 points 2 months ago

I [...] explicitly instructed Claude not to base anything on LGPL/GPL-licensed code

Did you even say please? Seriously what a great idea, use a model trained with code and then tell it to not use that code