On Thu, Mar 5, 2026 at 5:26 AM Ben Beasley via legal <[email protected]> wrote: > > The current upstream maintainer of python-chardet recently used the > Claude Code LLM to completely rewrite the library for version 7.0.0[1]. > The source code now has no obvious direct relationship with previous > versions. > > The maintainer used the LLM-based rewrite as justification to > unilaterally relicense the project from LGPL-2.1-or-later to MIT. This > has prompted a debate about whether or not the maintainer truly has the > right to do so, given their deep familiarity with the LGPL code and > other considerations. The original author of the library feels that the > relicensing was improper[2]. > > There is no great rush to make a decision about how to handle this > particular situation. I can keep python-chardet at 6.0.0 in Fedora for > quite a while. However, we in Fedora may end up having to make a > decision sooner or later on what to do about cases like this. Even if > the question can be somehow sidestepped for chardet, we can expect to be > faced with an increasing number of similar situations.
I've been following this. Typically Fedora does not second-guess upstream relicensing acts (or forks that essentially involve project relicensing), but there have been some notable exceptions. Richard > > [1] https://github.com/chardet/chardet/pull/322 > > [2] https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 > -- _______________________________________________ legal mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected] Do not reply to spam, report it: https://forge.fedoraproject.org/infra/tickets/issues/new
