The newest open-source concern around AI that is seeing a lot of interest this weekend is when large language models / AI code generators may rewrite large parts of a codebase and then the “developers” claiming an alternative license incompatible with the original source license. This became a real concern this week with a popular Python project experiencing an AI-driven code rewrite and now published under an alternative license that its original author does not agree with and incompatible with the original code.

Chardet as a Python character encoding detector with its v7.0 release last week was a “ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet.” This rewrite was largely driven via AI/LLM and claims to be up to 41x faster and offer an array of new features. But with this AI-driven rewrite, the license shifted from the LGPL to MIT.

  • med@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    11 days ago

    It still doesn’t matter.

    • They can coopt all the open source licenses they want, the development work doesn’t need them.
    • They’re not capturing all commits going forward in time, they’ll have to redo it every time they need an updated library.
    • Any legal work done later that legitimizes this relicensing will open the door for the public, open source world, and more importantly, other relicensing companies to do it to them.

    I believe the end game of legitimizing open source relicensing theft is accidentally abolishing software copyright altogether.

    https://nedroidcomics.tumblr.com/image/41879001445