• [$] The relicensing of chardet

    From LWN.net@1337:1/100 to All on Thu Mar 5 19:15:07 2026
    [$] The relicensing of chardet

    Date:
    Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:13:29 +0000

    Description:
    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.

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    Link to news story:
    https://lwn.net/Articles/1061534/


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