Comment by raggi

5 months ago

Look, forget the details, step back and consider the implications of the principle.

Someone should not be able to write a semi-common core utility, provide it as a public good, abandon it for over a decade, and yet continue to hold the rest of the world hostage just because of provenance. That’s a trap and it’s not in any public interest.

The true value of these things only comes from use. The extreme positions for ideals might be nice at times, but for example we still don’t have public access to printer firmware. Most of this ideology has failed in key originating goals and continues to cause headaches.

If we’re going to share, share. If you don’t want to share, don’t. But let’s not setup terminal traps, no one benefits from that.

If we flip this back around though, shouldn’t this all be MPL and Netscape communications? (Edit: turns out they had an argument about that in the past on their own issue tracker: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/36)

4 comments

raggi

Reply
luke5441  5 months ago

LGPL means "gift to the world". The license ensures that any modification/improvements stay a gift to the world.

People not being okay with having to share their improvements not being able to use the software is by design.

I don't get how you get from there to some sinister hostage taking situation.

Also everyone that contributes to the previous LGPL verison probably contributed under LGPL only, so it is now just one guy...

  • raggi  5 months ago

    LGPL applies to the LGPL’d code, not to every piece of code someone might add to the repository or under the same name implicitly.

    The claim being made is that because some prior implementation was licensed one way, all other implementations must also be licensed as such.

    AIUI the code has provenance in Netscape, prior to the chardet library, and the Netscape code has provenance in academic literature.

    Now the question of what constitutes a rewrite is complex, and maybe somewhat more complex with the AI involvement, but if we take the current maintainers story as honest they almost certainly passed the bar of independence for the code.