Hello here A very interesting and somewhat relevant AI-related debate.
Recently Dan Blanchard, who maintained Charder (LGPL dependency used by many popular Python libraries) used AI to write it from scratch, creating a "clean-room" implementation. This implementation keeps the API and released version 7 licenced under the MIT licence. If this upholds, we can use chardet as a dependency instead of charset-normalizer. A few years ago we discussed using chardet as mandatory dependnecy is not allowed according to ASF policies [3] . We had it transitively via mandatory "requests," which required it as a mandatory dependency. And we solved the issue (for us and many other projects that used requests). We worked with the creator of "charset-normalizer," and I ran extensive tests to support Ash's PR [4]. A few months later, the "requests" maintainers merged the PR and released new requests version, and since then we have used charset-normalizer as a chardet replacement. There is obviously a debate about whether this is legal - issue from someone who claims is the original creator of chardet (Mark Pilgrim) [5] with some 300 comments already and another [6] where someone claims that using chardet 7.0.0 is a risk because its licence is disputable. It seems AI opens up some interesting debates and is changing how OSS licencing/relicencing works in practice (including some thinking that eventually it might kill open-source, which I absolutely don't believe :) ). There are no obvious actions for us, but this is an interesting case to observe and see how it will impact the licencing world. I found this interesting enough to bring to your attention and wonder what others think about it (if they are interested at all that is). J. [1] Slashdot post: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/03/06/1614252/python-chardet-package-replaced-with-llm-generated-clone-re-licensed [2] The register story: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/06/ai_kills_software_licensing/ [3] Ash's post about chardet licence from 2021: https://lists.apache.org/thread/s5w9b98xwqr2cyn1sh98nh603h2ws4jg [4] Ash's PR making chardet an optional dependency in requests https://github.com/psf/requests/pull/5797 [5] No right to relicence this project PR from someone who claims is Mark Pilgrim https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 [6] Chardet 7.0.0 presents unacceptable risk issue - https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/331
