| ▲ | moralestapia 6 hours ago |
| >I personally have a horse in the race here because I too wanted chardet to be under a non-GPL license for many years. Ugh, it's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or non mentally capable enough to understand what is the purpose of software licenses. "But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are you like, 8 years old? Licenses exists for a reason, which is to enforce them. When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a deliberate decision. S/he wants these terms to be reigning over his/her work, in perpetuity. People who pretend they didn't see it or play dumb are in for some well-deserved figuring out. |
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| ▲ | the_mitsuhiko 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > "But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are you like, 8 years old? Just because things are not as one wants, does not stop that desire to be there. > When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a deliberate decision. Potentially, potentially not. I used to release software under GPL and LGPL but changed my mind a few years after that. I did so in part because of conversations I had with others that convinced me that my values are closer aligned with permissive licenses. So engaging in a friendly discourse with a maintainer to ask them to relicense is a perfectly fine thing to do and an issue has been with chardet for many, many years on the license. |
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| ▲ | jimmaswell 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This entirely misses the point. Re-implementing code based on API surface and compatibility is established fair use if done properly (Compaq v. IBM, Google v. Oracle). There's nothing wrong with doing that if you don't like a license. What's in question is doing this with AI that may or may not have been trained on the source. In the instance in the article where the result is very different, it's probably in the clear regardless. I'm sympathetic to the author as I generally don't like GPL either outside specific cases where it works well like the Linux kernel. |
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| ▲ | blell 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This reminds me of people crying over toybox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toybox#Controversy | |
| ▲ | trueismywork 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The real test would be to see how much of generated code is similar to the old code. Because then it is still a copyright. Just becsuse you drew mickey mouse from memory doesnt above you if it looks close enough to original hickey mouse. | | |
| ▲ | kccqzy 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | That’s I believe woefully inadequate. There are some levels of code similarity: Level 0: the code is just copied Level 1: the code only has white space altered so the AST is the same Level 2: the code has minor refactoring such as changing variables names and function names (in a compiled language the object code would be highly similar; and this can easily be detected by tools like https://github.com/jplag/JPlag) Level 3: the code has had significant refactoring such as moving functionality around, manually extracting code to new functions and manually inlining functions Level 4: the code does the same conceptual steps as the old code but with different internal architecture At least in the United States you have to reach Level 4 because only concepts are not copyrightable. And I believe chardet has indeed reached level 4 in this rewrite. | |
| ▲ | the_mitsuhiko 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The real test would be to see how much of generated code is similar to the old code. I have looked at the project earlier today there is effectively no resemblance other than the public API. |
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| ▲ | coldtea 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| >Licenses exists for a reason Yes, and the choice of license for a project is made for a reason that not necessarily everybody agree with. And the people who don't agree, have every right to implement a similar, even file-format or API compatible, project and give it another license. Gnumeric vs Excel, for example, or forks like MariaDB and Valkey. But whether they do that alternative licensed project or not, it's perfectly rational, to not like the choice of license the original is in. They legally have to respect it, but that doesn't mean there's anything irational to disliking it or wishing it was changed. And it's not merely idle wishing: sometimes it can make the original author/vendor to reconsider and switch license. QT is a big example. Blender. Or even proprietary to open (Mozilla to MPL). "It's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or non mentally capable enough to understand this" |
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| ▲ | moralestapia 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Hmm ... you don't have to ask for consent. You just slap the license you want to your code and that's it. It's not some sort of democracy, lol, it's a set of exclusive rights that are created the moment the work being copyrighted is produced. (For a quick intro I recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxVs7FCgOig) In the case of the license in question (L/GPL), it's one of the most strict ones out there, it explicitly forbids relicensing code under a different non-compatible license, like MIT; let me says that again, L/GPL EXPLICITLY FORBIDS the thing that happened here from happening. I sympathize with the guy that spent 12 years of his life maintaining the code, thank you for your service or something, but that does not make a difference. The wording of the (L/GPL) license is clear and the original author and most of the other 50 or so contributors did not approve of this. | | |
| ▲ | coldtea an hour ago | parent [-] | | >Hmm ... you don't have to ask for consent Nobody said you have. >You just slap the license you want to your code and that's it. Nobody said you can't. >It's not some sort of democracy, lol Nobody said it is, lol. I'm answering to what you actually wrote, that those expressing their dislike of a project having a speicific license are "either malicious or non mentally capable enough" what licenses are for. That's a stupid argument putting other people down with a silly strawman. One can be perfecty capable to understand what licenses are for and still think a project made a mistake chosing a specific language, or want it to change to another (and sometimes, like in the examples I gave, the latter works too). | | |
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