[$] The relicensing of chardet
Chardet
is a Python module that attempts to determine which character set was used
to encode a text string. It was originally written by Mark Pilgrim, who is
also the author of a number of Python books; the 1.0 release happened in
2006. For many years, this module has been under the maintainership of
Dan Blanchard. Chardet has always been licensed under the LGPL, but, with
the 7.0.0
release, Blanchard changed the terms to the permissive MIT license.
That has led to an extensive (and ongoing) discussion on when code can be
relicensed against the wishes of its original author, and whether using a
large language model to rewrite code is a legitimate way to strip copyleft
requirements from code.
