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.
It took big tech a long time, but they did find a way to kill open source software in the end. Replacing it with unreadable, unmaintainable and inhuman code is the cherry on top. You couldn’t make it up.
They still can’t copyright it. 😆
Maybe not yet, but it’s just a matter of time before the shitstains running the world’s governments decide they want more money.
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.
