Link: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327

for those not familiar with Mark Pilgrim, he is/was a prolific author, blogger, and hacker who abruptly disappeared from the internet in 2011.

HN comments

Utterly insane to change the license and not realize it's still a derivative product, especially when it has the same name!

I wouldn't be surprised if the potential problem wasn't limited to the original chardet alone, regarding what might be affected by this rewrite allegedly having silently relicensed code...

If it was indeed a full rewrite via AI, committing it to the same repo, with the same project name, only an incremented major version and a license change -- seems to be an effort at co-opting the previous LGPL project's name and visibility by the current maintainer and serves to erase (however large or small) the work of previous contributors.

Even if it truly is a 'clean-room' re-implementation, it should be called 'chardet-ng' or something to distinguish it from the original.