Copyleft

License Laundering a Copyleft Project

6 minute read

An image of a branch covered in ice. Pretty cold.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer; this is not legal analysis, nor legal advice, just an opinion.

Mark Pilgrim, the original creator of chardet recently opened a GitHub issue on the project after he found that the project he started was relicensed under the MIT license from the original LGPL, a process generally referred to as license laundering. The current maintainer, Dan Blanchard, rewrote the project “from scratch” using Claude, changed its license, and assigned the copyrights to himself, claiming this was an independent implementation done in a clean room environment.

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Copyleft From Now On

7 minute read

A bunch of notebooks

I’ve been putting my work online in various formats for almost 20 years now. For most of that time, I’ve used extremely permissive licenses such as the MIT License to distribute my work in an attempt to promote usage and adoption. Now that I’m quite a bit older and experienced (you may say curmudgeony), let me tell you why I’m changing my tune and am adopting a Copyleft approach.

In the past decade or so, I’ve noticed a widespread adoption of the MIT license, even by those who in the past opposed Open Source Software as a concept. Why the swing and why so extreme? You’d think that those companies would slowly adopt Open Source rather than going all-in all at once. What’s going on?

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