Comment by 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...
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.