Regardless of the legal interpretations, I think it's very worrying if an automated AI rewrite of GPLed code (or any code for that matter) could somehow be used to circumvent the original license. That kinda takes out the one stick the open source community has to force soulless multinationals to contribute back to the open source projects they use.

Neither does the maintainer that claims a mechanical test of structural similarities can prove anything either waybwith regard to whether legally it is a derivative work (or even a mechnaical copy without the requisite new creative work to be a derivative work.)

And then Pilgrim is again wrong by saying that the use of Claude definitively makes it a derivative work because of the inability to prove it the work in question did not influence the neurons involved.

It is all dueling lay misreadings of copyright law, but it is also an area where the actual specific applicable law, on any level specific enough to cleanly apply, isn’t all that clear.

I think this is a bit too broad. There are actually three possible cases.

When there is similar code, the only defense possible to prove that you have not copied the original is to show that your process is a clean room re-implementation.

If the code is completely different, then clean room or not is indeed irrelevant. The only way the author can claim that you violated their copyright despite no apparent similarity is for them to have proof you followed some kind of mechanical process for generating the new code based on the old one, such as using an LLM with the old code as input prompt (TBD, completely unsettled: what if the old code is part of the training set, but was not part of the input?) - the burden of proof is on them to show that the dissimilarity is only apparent.

In realistic cases, you will have a mix of similar and dissimilar portions, and portions where the similarity is questionable. Each of these will need to be analyzed separately - and it's very likely that all the similar portions will need to be re-written again if you can't prove that they were not copied directly or from memory from the original, even if they represent a very small part of the work overall. Even if you wrote a 10k page book, if you copied one whole page verbatim from another book, you will be liable for that page, and the author may force you to take it out.

I'm with you here, but I see another problem.

The expected functionality of chardet (detect the unicode encoding) is kind of fixed - apart from edge cases and new additions to unicode, you'd expect the original and new implementations to largely pass the same tests, and have a lot of similar code such as for "does this start with a BOM".

The fact that the JPlag shows such a low %overlap for an implementation of "the same interface" is convincing evidence for me that it's not just plagiarised.

This is correct. I think any author of a main chunk of code that they claim ownership to (which is probably all of us!) should at least study the basics of copyright law. Getting little details wrong can cost you time, money and eventually your business if you're not careful.

If you let an LLM merely rephrase the codebase, that's like letting it rephrase the Harry Potter novels. Which, I'm pretty sure, would still be considered a copy under copyright law, not an original work, despite not copying any text verbatim.

Given that LLMs were trained on the repository directly, it's not just the case that anything made by the LLM is a derivative work, the LLM ITSELF is a derivative work. After all, they all are substantially based on GPL licensed works by others. The standard courts have always used for "substantially based" by the way, is the ability to extract from the new work anything bigger than an excerpt of the original work.

So convincing evidence, by historical standards, that ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot AND Claude are all derivative works of the GPL linux kernel can be gotten simply by asking "give me struct sk_buff", then keep asking until you're out of the headers (say, ask how a network driver uses it).

That means if courts are honest (and they never are when it comes to GPL) OpenAI, Google and Anthropic would be forced to release ALL materials needed to duplicate their models "at cost". Given how LLMs work that would include all models, code, AND training data. After all, that is the contract these companies entered into when using the GPL licensed linux kernel.

But of course, to courts copyright applies to you when Microsoft demands it ($30000 per violation PLUS stopping the use of the offending file/torrent/software/... because such measures are apparently justified for downloading a $50 piece of software), it does not apply to big companies when the rules would destroy them.

The last time this was talked about someone pointed out that Microsoft "stole", as they call it, the software to do product keys. They were convicted for doing that, and the judge even increased damages because of Microsoft's behavior in the case.

But there is no way in hell you'll ever get justice from the courts in this. In fact courts have already decided that AI training is fair use on 2 conditions:

1) that the companies acquired the material itself without violating copyright. Of course it has already been proven that this is not the case for any of them (they scraped it without permission, which has been declared illegal again and again in the file sharing trials)

2) that the models refuse to reproduce copyrighted works. Now go to your favorite model and ask "Give me some code written by Linus Torvalds": not a peep about copyright violation.

... but it does not matter, and it won't matter. Courts are making excuses to allow LLM models to violate any copyright, the excuse does not work, does not convince rational people, but it just doesn't matter.

But of course, if you thought that just because they cheat against the law to make what they're already doing legal, they'll do the same for you, help you violate copyright, right? After all, that's how they work! Ok now go and ask:

"Make me an image of Mickey Mouse peeling a cheese banana under an angry moon"

And you'll get a reply "YOU EVIL COPYRIGHT VILLAIN". Despite, of course, Mickey Mouse no longer being covered under copyright!

And to really get angry, find your favorite indie artist, and ask to make something based on their work. Even "Make an MC Escher style painting of Sonic the Hedgehog" ... even that doesn't count as copyright violation, only the truly gigantic companies deserve copyright protection.

Ok sure, in the alternative, here's the argument:

The AI was trained with the code, so the complete rewrite is tainted and not a clean room. I can't believe this would need spelling out.

> "Insider Knowledge" is not relevant for copyright law. That is more in the space of patent law then copyright law.

On the contrary. Except for discussions about punitive damages and so on, insider knowledge or lack thereof is completely irrelevant to patent law. If company A has a patent on something, they can assert said patent against company B regardless of whether any person in company B had ever seen or heard of company A and their patent. Company B could have a legal trail proving they invented their product that matches the patent from scratch with no outside knowledge, and that they had been doing this before company A had even filed their patent, and it wouldn't matter at all - company A, by virtue of filing and being granted a patent, has a legal monopoly on that invention.

In contrast, for copyright the right is intrinsically tied to the origin of a work. If you create a digital image that is entirely identical at the pixel level with a copyrighted work, and you can prove that you had never seen that original copyrighted work and you created your image completely independently, then you have not broken anyone's copyright and are free to sell copies of your own work. Even more, you have your own copyright over your own work, and can assert it over anyone that tries to copy your work without permission, despite an identical work existing and being owned by someone else.

Now, purely in principle this would remain true even if you had seen the other work. But in reality, it's impossible to convince any jury that you happened to produce, entirely out of your own creativity, an original work that is identical to a work you had seen before.

> But you very much can rewrite a project under new license even if you have in depth knowledge. IFF you don't have the old project open/look at it while doing so.

No, this is very much false. You will never be able to win a court case on this, as any significant similarity between your work and the original will be considered a copyright violation, per the preponderance of the evidence.

If I read Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and then proceed to write a structurally identical novel with many of the same story beats and character types, it will not be difficult to convince a jury exposed to these facts that I’ve created a derivative work.

On the other hand, if I can prove to the jury’s satisfaction that I’ve never been exposed to Puzo’s work in any form, it’s independent creation.

If the new maintainers used Claude as their “fancy code generator” (there’s a Claude.md file in the repository so it seems so) then it was almost certainly trained with the chardet source code.

> And don't just rewrite the same code from memory, but instead write fully new code producing the same/similar outputs.

How different does the new code have to be from the old code and how is that measured?

This is a bad argument.

Think of a rewrite (by a human or an LLM) as a translation. If you wrote a book in English and somebody translated it into Spanish, it'd still be a copyright issue. Same thing with translations.

That's very different to taking the idea of a body of work. So you can't copyright the idea of a pirate taking a princess hostage and a hero rescuing her. That's too generic. But even here there are limits. There have been lawsuits over artistic works being too similar.

Back to software, you can't copyright the idea of photo-editing software but you can copyright the source code that produces that software. If you can somehow prompt an LLM to produce photo editing software or if a person writes it themselves then you have what's generally referred to as a "cleanroom" implmentation and that's copyright-free (although you may have patent issues, which is a whole separate issue).

But even if you prompted an LLM that way, how did the LLM learn what it needed? Was the source code of another project an input in its training? This is a legal grey area, currently. But I suspect it's going to be a problem.

I think you could have an LLM produce a written English detailed description of the complete logic of the program and tests.

Then use another LLM to produce code from that spec.

This would be similar to the cleanroom technique.

Hate to be "that guy" but in a corrupt legal system, which ours is, none of this matters. Who has the influence and dollars to make the decision theirs is all that matters.

That's not what a derivative work means, though. Being exposed to something doesn't mean you can't create original work which is similar to it (otherwise every song or artwork would be a derivative work of everything before it)

People do cleanroom implementations as a precaution against a lawsuit, but it's not a necessary element.

In fact, even if some parts are similar, it's still not a clear-cut case - the defendant can very well argue that the usage was 1. transformative 2. insubstantial to the entirety of work.

"The complaint is the maintainers violated the terms of LGPL, that they must prove no derivation from the original code to legally claim this is a legal new version without the LGPL license."

The burden of proof is on the accuser.

"I am genuinely asking (I’m not a license expert) if a valid clean room rewrite is possible, because at a minimum you would need a spec describing all behavior, which ses to require ample exposure to the original to be sufficiently precise."

Linux would be illegal if so (they had knowledge of Unix before), and many GNU tools are libre API-compatible reimplementations of previous Unix utilities :)

The copyright argument is the only relevant argument. If the new work is a derived work of the original, then it follows by definition that the new work is under the copryight of the original's author(s). Since the original chardet was distributed by its author(s) only under the LGPL, any copy/derivative of it that anyone else creates must be distributed only under the LGPL, per the terms of the LGPL.

Now, whether chardet 7.0.0 is a derivative of chardet or not is a matter of copyright law that the LGPL has no say on, and a rather murky ground with not that much case law to rely on behind it. If it's not, the new author is free to distribute chardet 7.0.0 under any license they want, since it is a new work under his copyright.

It's the same project/name, with a version bump.

You're not describing anything new, you're describing progress. A company invests time and money and expertise into building a product, it becomes established, people copy in 1/10th of the time, the quality of products across the industry improve. Long before generative AI, Instagram famously copied Snapchat's stories concept in a weekend, and that is now a multi-multi-multi-billion contributor to Meta's bottom line.

As engineers, we often think only about code, but code has never been what makes a business succeed. If your client thinks that their businesses primary value is in the mobile app code they wrote, 1) why is it even open source? 2) the business is doomed.

Realistically, though, this is inconsequential, and any time spent worrying about this is wasted time. You don't protect yourself from your competitor by worrying about them copying your mobile app.

You might be interested in the dark factory work here https://factory.strongdm.ai/

They do something very similar for some of their work. It’s hard to use external services so they replicate them and the cost of doing so has come down from “don’t be daft, we can’t reimplement slack and google drive this sprint just to make testing faster” to realistic. They run the sdks against the live services and their own implementations until they don’t see behaviour differences. Now they have a fast slack and drive and more (that do everything they need for their testing) accelerating other work. I’m dramatically shifting my concept of what’s expensive and not for development. What you’re describing could have been done by someone before, but the difficulty of building that backend has dropped enormously. Even if the application was closed you could probably either now or soon start to do the same thing starting with building back to core user stories and building the app as well.

You can view some of this as having things like the application as a very precise specification.

Really fascinating moment of change.

> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"

If the platform is so trivial that it can be reverse engineered by an AI agent from a dumb frontend, what's there to protect against? One has to assume that their moat is not that part of the backend but something else entirely about how the service is being provided.

Interesting case, IANAL but sounds legal and legit. The AI did not have expose to the backend it re-implemented. The API itself is public and not protectable.

> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"

You can try patenting; but not after the fact. Copyright won't help you here. You can't copyright an algorithm or idea, just a specific form or implementation of it. And there is a lot of legal history about what is and isn't a derivative work here. Some companies try to forbid reverse engineering in their licensing. But of course that might be a bit hard to enforce, or prove. And it doesn't work for OSS stuff in any case.

Stuff like this has been common practice in the industry for decades. Most good software ideas get picked apart, copied and re-implemented. IBM's bios for the first PC quickly got reverse engineered and then other companies started making IBM compatible PCs. IBM never open sourced their bios and they probably did not intend for that to happen. But that didn't matter. Likewise there were several PC compatible DOS variants that each could (mostly) run the same applications. MS never open sourced DOS either. There are countless examples of people figuring out how stuff works and then creating independent implementations. All that is perfectly legal.

> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, as someone launching a niche b2b SaaS. The unfortunate conclusion that I have come to is: have more capital than anyone for distribution.

Is there any other answer to this? I hope so, as we are not in the well-capitalized category, but we have friendly user traction. I think the only possible way to succeed is to quietly secure some big contracts.

I had been hoping to bootstrap, but how can we in this new "code is cheap" world? I know it's always been like this, but it is even worse now, isn't it?

No serious enterprise SaaS company differentiates themselves solely on the product (the products are usually terrible). It's the sales channel, the fact that you know how to bill a big company, the human engineer who is sent on site to deploy and integrate the product, the people on the support line 24/7, the regulatory framework that ensures the customer can operate legally and obtain insurance, the fact that there's a deep pool of potential hires who have used and understand the product. Those are the differentiators.

If your backend is trivial enough to be implemented by a large language model, what value are you providing?

I know it's a provoking question but that answers why a competitor is not a competitor.

"How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"

That's the neat thing: you don't!

The famous case Google vs Oracle may need to be re-evaluated in the light of Agents making API implementation trivial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

> "How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"

DMCA. The EULA likely prohibits reverse engineering. If a competitor does that, hit'em with lawyers.

Or, if you want to be able to sleep at night, recognize this as an opportunity instead of a threat.

Maybe a better question is:

How do our competitors protect themselves against us doing this?

Makes me wonder when AI will put the mobile phone OS duopoly to an end.

Nothing. This is why SaaS stocks took a dump last week.

I think the genie is out of the bottle on this one and there's really no putting it back.

There is a certain amount of brand loyalty and platform inertia that will keep people. Also, as you point out, just having the source code isn't enough. Running a platform is more than that. But that gap will narrow with time.

The broader issue here is that there are people in tech who don't realize that AI is coming for their jobs (and companies) too. I hope people in this position can maybe understand the overall societal issues for other people seeing their industries "disrupted" (ie destroyed) by AI.

Or more like he did the right thing to maximise the utility of the project ;) It's basically "a bunch of people's feelings" vs. it being more widely used, improving the ecosystem, and so on.

> Sounds like they didn’t build a proper clean room setup: the agent writing the code could see the original code.

It doesn't matter how they structure the agents. Since chardet is in the LLM training set, you can't claim any AI implementation thereof is clean room.

This seems right to me. If you ask a LLM to derive a spec that has no expressive element of the original code (a clean-room human team can carefully verify this), and then ask another instance of the LLM (with fresh context) to write out code from the spec, how is that different from a "clean room" rewrite? The agent that writes the new code only ever sees the spec, and by assumption (the assumption that's made in all clean room rewrites) the spec is purely factual with all copyrightable expression having been distilled out. But the "deriving the spec (and verifying that it's as clean as possible)" is crucial and cannot be skipped!

Not if the codebase was included in training the implementer.

Answer: probably not, as API-topography is also a part of copyright

Edit: this is wrong

Yeah I think, the Compaq / IBM precedent can only superficially apply. It would be like having two teams only meet in a room full of documentation - but both teams crammed the source code the day before. (That, the source code you are "reverse engineering" is in the training data.) It doesn't make sense.

Also, it's weird that it's okay apparently to use pirated materials to teach an LLM, but maybe not to disseminate what the LLM then tells you.

Let's see how much time it takes for the Wikipedia page to mention the "a2mark" GitHub user :)

(I can hear a "challenge accepted" from some random HNer already)

There's a subtext in your point that I want to expand on.

Tech people, particularly engineers, tend to make a fundamental error when dealing with the law that almost always causes them to make wrong conclusions. And that error is that they look for technical compliance when so much of the law is subjective and holistic.

An example I like to use is people who do something illegal on the Internet and then use the argument "you can't prove I did it (with absolute certainty)". It could've been someone who hacked your Wifi. You don't know who on the Wifi did it, etc. But the law will look at the totality of the evidence. Did the activity occur when you were at home and stop when you weren't? How likely are alternative explanations? Etc.

All of that will be considered based on some legal standard depending on the venue. In civil court that tends to be "the preponderance of the evidence" (meaning more likely than not) while in criminal court it's "beyond a reasonable doubt" (which is a much higher standard).

So, using your example, an engineer will often fall into a trap of thinking they can substitute enough words to have a new original work, Ship of Theseus-like. And the law simply doesn't work that way.

So, when this gets to a court (which it will, it's not a question of "if"), the court will consider how necessary the source work was to what you did. If you used it for a direct translation (eg from C++ to Go) then you're going to lose. My prediction is that even using it in training data will be cause for a copyright claim.

If you use Moby Dick in your training data and ask an LLM to write a book like Moby Dick (either explicitly or implicitly) then you're going to have an issue. Even if you split responsibilities so one LLM (training on Moby Dick) comes up with a structure/prompt and another LLM (not trained on Moby Dick) writes it, I don't think that'll really help you avoid the issue.

Being completely untainted is the standard many reimplementations set for themselves to completely rule out legal trouble. For example ReactOS won't let you contribute if you have ever seen Windows code. Because if you have never seen it, there can be no allegation that you copied it.

That is however stricter than what's actually legally necessary. It's just that the actual legal standard would require a court ruling to determine if you passed it, and everyone wants to avoid that. As a consequence there also aren't a lot of court cases to draw similarities to

"Taint" requires that the code is demonstratably derivative from the *GPL licensed work.

This is actually harder standard than some people think.

The absolute clean room approaches in USA are there because they help short circuit a long lawsuit where a bigger corp can drag forever until you're broken.

Not a lawyer, but that always seemed naively correct to me.

However, the copyright system has always be a sham to protect US capital interests. So I would be very surprised if this is actually ruled/enforced. And in any case american legislators can just change the law.

Yes, that's what some lonely people have been shouting in the desert since the LLM craze started.

That whole clean room argument makes no sense. Project changed governance and was significantly refactored or reimplemented... I think the maintainers deserve to call it their own. Original-pre MIT release can stay LGPL.

I don't think this is a precedent either, plenty of projects changed licenses lol.

I keep kind mixing them up but the GPL licenses keep popping up as occasionally horror stories. Maybe the license is just poorly written for today's standards?

Python wouldn't take LGPL code in the standard library. And Dan Blanchard imagined more people would want to work on it.[1]

[1] https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4...

"I prefer MIT/BSD licenses just because they're simpler"[0]

Seems like there is no real point, just vibes.

[0] https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/36

Impossible to code inspect and verify. Someone else commented 'smells like a supply chain attack' and while I'm sure it's not intended to be, there is no way to verify. And who believes, in half a million lines of code, no bugs have been introduced?

That doesn't seem related at all, this is just adding attribution, not changing the license through LLM-washing

This is effectively a contract. You can put anything you want in a contract, but contracts are enforceable to only to the extent they comply with the law (statutes, case law, the constitution, etc.)

So to settle this, someone needs to violate this license and get sued. Or maybe proactively sue?

Unicode detection is the kind of utility the language maintainers want in their package collection if not in the standard library, and programmers who have to do anything with "plain text" files might want to rely on.

Releasing a core library like this under a genuinely free licence (MIT) is a service to anyone working in the ecosystem.

Nobody that is not already writing (L)GPL licensed software wants to pull LGPL licensed libraries into his software. I'm not a lawyer. If you have it in separate object artefacts that you can dynamically link to, you should be fine. Everything else may be more difficult.

See what FFmpeg writes on this topic: https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260749

This indeed the real issue (not the AI angle per se, but the wholesale replacement. The licensing issue is real, but less important IMO).

Half a million lines of code have been deleted and replaced over the course of four days, directly to the main branch with no opportunity for community review and testing. (I've no idea whether depending projects use main or the stable branch, but stable is nearly 4 years old at this point, so while I hope it's the version depending projects use, I wouldn't put money on it.)

The whole thing smells a lot like a supply chain attack - and even if it's in good faith, that's one hell of a lot of code to be reviewed in order to make sure.

The drop"-in" compatibility claims are also just wrong? I ran it on the old test suite from 6.0 (which is completely absent now), and quickly checking:

- the outputs, even if correctly deduced, are often incompatible: "utf-16be" turns into "utf-16-be", "UTF-16" turns into "utf-16-le" etc. FWIW, the old version appears to have been a bit of a mess (having had "UTF-16", "utf-16be" and "utf-16le" among its outputs) but I still wouldn't call the new version _compatible_,

- similarly, all `ascii` turn into `Windows-1252`

- sometimes it really does appear more accurate,

- but sometimes it appears to flip between wider families of closely related encodings, like one SHIFT_JIS test (confidence 0.99) turns into cp932 (confidence 0.34), or the whole family of tests that were determined as gb18030 (chinese) are now sometimes determined as gb2312 (the older subset of gb18030), and one even as cp1006, which AFAIK is just wrong.

As for performance claims, they appear not entirely false - analyzing all files took 20s, versus 150s with v6.0. However, looks like the library sometimes takes 2s to lazy initialize something, which means that if one uses `chardetect` CLI instead of Python API, you'll pay this cost each time and get several times slower instead.

Oh, and this "Negligible import memory (96 B)" is just silly and obviously wrong.

Yeah, there's really low quality code added if you take a look.

Once you use a LLM, the room is no longer clean.

I agree that (while the ethics of this are a different issue) the copyright question is not obviously clear-cut. Though IANAL.

As the LGPL says:

> A "work based on the Library" means either the Library or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Library or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated straightforwardly into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".)

Is v7.0.0 a [derivative work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work)? It seems to depend on the details of the source code (implementing the same API is not copyright infringement).

I was wondering how the existing case law of translated works, from one language to an other works here. It would at suggest that this is an infringement of the license especially because of the lack of creativity. But IANAL and of course no idea of applicable case law.

"Exposure" means here, I think, that they feed the 6.X code version to Claude.

the ai copy pasted the existing project. How can such a procedure not fall under copyright?

Especially now that ai can do this for any kind of intellectual property, like images, books or sourcecode. If judges would allow an ai rewrite to count as an original creation, copyright as we know it completely ends world wide.

Instead whats more likely is that no one is gonna buy that shit

I came here to say this. While I agree with Mark that what they’re doing is not nice, I’m not sure it’s wrong. A clean-room implementation is one way the industry worked around licensing in the past (and present, I guess), but it’s not a requirement in law as far as I know.

I’m not sure that “a total rewrite” wouldn’t, in fact, pass muster - depending on how much of a rewrite it was of course. The ‘clean room’ approach was just invented as a plausible-sounding story to head off gratuitous lawsuits. This doesn’t look as defensible against the threat of a lawsuit, but it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t win that lawsuit (I’m not saying it would, I haven’t read or compared the code vs its original). Google copied the entire API of the Java language, and got away with it when Oracle sued. Things in a courtroom can often go in surprising ways…

[edit: negative votes, huh, that’s a first for a while… looks like Reddit/Slashdot-style “downvote if you don’t like what is being said” is alive and well on HN]

It will hold up in court. The line of argument of “well I went into a dark room with only the first Harry Potter book and a type writer and reproduced the entire work, so now I own the rewrite” doesn’t hold up in court, it doesn’t either when when you put AI in the mix. It doesn’t matter if the result is slightly different, a judge will rule based on the fact that this even is literally what the law is intended to prevent, it’s not a case of which incantation or secret sentence you should utter to free the work of its existing license.

My gut feeling is no, a work is not a derivative of a compliance test suite that it passes and was used to guide it. But I'm not a lawyer.

If you can afford to defend yourself in court

General patents aren't allowed.

It would be in the public domain. Wouldn't really matter all that much if the end goal was to get it included in the Python standard library, but the whole "Copyright (c) 2024 Dan Blanchard" in the license file would just be BS.

The big question is whether or not is it a derivative work of an LGPL project. If it is, then it's just an outright copyright violation.

I finally had to mute r/isthisai on Reddit because there’s now a subset of people who see the hand of AI in everything. Could that be generated by a clanker? Sure, but it’s also exactly what I would write if I wanted a quick pitch for a library that addresses some immediate concerns. It’s also what I would focus on if the fact we had just finished a rebuild from scratch.

As Freud famously said, sometimes an em dash is just an em dash.

For me, some projects I start by writing a readme.txt by hand. That saves me time in cases I realize I'd be making something pointless. (I don't use chatbots when coding though)

Isn’t it? I mean 12 stage pipeline has a very specific meaning to me in this area, and is not a new way of describing something. The release notes description sounds like a multi stage pipeline.

Do you know this kind of area and are commenting on the code?

"ok chatgpt, what name do i give to this algorithm, so it sounds fancy and advanced?"

If you license a project MIT, you're telling the legal system that you don't want to own it.

There would be no open source without the gpl

Open source as a concept is intertwined with the concept of a license.

I think it's just the GPL family of licenses that tend tend to cause most problems. I appreciate their intent, but the outcome often leaves a lot to be desired.

The user is the end-user of the product. If the relicensing means that someone down the line receives a close-down binary application that he cannot modify, that's a violation of the user's rights.

Depends on who wants to take what away.

If I release blub 1.0.0 under GPL, you cannot fork it and add features and release that closed-source, but I can certainly do that as I have ownership. I can't stop others continuing to use 1.0.0 and develop it further under the GPL, but what happens to my own 1.1.0 onwards is up to me. I can even sell the rights to use it closed-source.

Code is only cheap with AI because AI ignores the law.

LGPL means "gift to the world". The license ensures that any modification/improvements stay a gift to the world.

People not being okay with having to share their improvements not being able to use the software is by design.

I don't get how you get from there to some sinister hostage taking situation.

Also everyone that contributes to the previous LGPL verison probably contributed under LGPL only, so it is now just one guy...

Fork it?