Open Source

License Laundering a Copyleft Project

2026-03-05 6 minute read

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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California AB-1043 Knock-On Effects

2026-03-02 4 minute read

Image Credit: “Justice isn’t blind, she carries a big stick” by Jason Rosenberg on Flickr

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

The way too short and ambiguous California bill AB-1043 seems to have the potential to do real damage to the software industry. It aims to consolidate age-verification at the operating system and application distribution levels seemingly without understanding what either actually are.

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Copyleft From Now On

2025-02-23 7 minute read

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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