You implement something essential in a different programming language, tout that it's better than its GPL counterpart, and lobby for a change.

For me, the biggest example is uutils. Started as a "homework", then turned into a "hobby project", then turned into a complete Rust rewrite of the GNU Coreutils. It even once touted they were planning to replace all util-linux as well. When you look into uutil org, it's a systemd-like project with tons of sub-projects.

For the lobby part, the same project touts "Debian might switch, soon". Debian-developers got angry, created a pull request to remove that line from the site, it just got denied, and the maintainer lashed out "This is my site, this is my project, don't bug me". The relevant thread starts at [0].

This is not always with AI, but companies can use AI to license-wash something with a "reverse engineer this, and reimplement it in X" type of prompts.

Chardet has been relicensed in a hostile manner as well [1] [2].

[0]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/06/msg00315.html

[1]: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177