Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens

Earlier this week, Dan Blanchard, maintainer of a Python character encoding detection library called chardet, released a new version of the library under a new software license.

In doing so, he may have killed "copyleft."

Version 7.0 employs an MIT license in place of the previous GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Developers who have an eye on commercial use of their open source works tend to prefer permissive licenses like MIT’s because they impose fewer obligations than copyleft licenses like GPL/LGPL, which require derivative works to be distributed under the same terms.

The entire economics of software development are dead, gone, over, kaput!

Blanchard says he was in the clear to change licenses because he used AI – Anthropic's Claude is now listed as a project contributor – to make what amounts to a clean room implementation of chardet. That's essentially a rewrite done without copying ...