In the world of open source, relicensing is notoriously difficult. It usually requires the unanimous consent of every person who has ever contributed a line of code, a feat nearly impossible for legacy projects. chardet , a Python character encoding detector used by requests and many others, has sat in that tension for years: as a port of Mozilla’s C++ code it was bound to the LGPL, making it a gray area for corporate users and a headache for its most famous consumer.

Recently the maintainers used Claude Code to rewrite the whole codebase and release v7.0.0 , relicensing from LGPL to MIT in the process. The original author, a2mark , saw this as a potential GPL violation

That is horrible

I [...] explicitly instructed Claude not to base anything on LGPL/GPL-licensed code

Did you even say please? Seriously what a great idea, use a model trained with code and then tell it to not use that code

Morals? Where we're going we won't need morals!