No right to relicense this project · Issue #327 · chardet/chardet · GitHub
- Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings
- Fork 300
- Issues 0
- Pull requests 0
- Discussions
- Actions
- Security and quality 0
- Insights
No right to relicense this project #327
New issue
Copy link
New issue
Copy link
Closed
Closed
No right to relicense this project#327
Copy link
Description
opened on Mar 4, 2026
Issue body actions
Hi, I'm Mark Pilgrim. You may remember me from such classics as "Dive Into Python" and "Universal Character Encoding Detector." I am the original author of chardet. First off, I would like to thank the current maintainers and everyone who has contributed to and improved this project over the years. Truly a Free Software success story.
However, it has been brought to my attention that, in the release 7.0.0, the maintainers claim to have the right to “relicense” the project. They have no such right; doing so is an explicit violation of the LGPL. Licensed code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a "clean room" implementation). Adding a fancy code generator into the mix does not somehow grant them any additional rights.
I respectfully insist that they revert the project to its original license.
Reactions are currently unavailable
Pinned by dan-blanchard
Pinned comment options
dan-blanchardon Mar 5, 2026
Hi Mark, and thank you for reaching out. If you are indeed the Mark Pilgrim, I want to say sincerely that chardet (and Dive Into Python) had an enormous impact on my career and on the Python ecosystem. I've been the primary maintainer and contributor to this project for >12 years and I don't take that stewardship lightly.
I want to address your concerns directly.
The core claim: that this is not a clean-room implementation and therefore must remain LGPL.
I understand the concern, and I think it's worth engaging with seriously. You're right that I have had extensive exposure to the original codebase: I've been maintaining it for over a decade. A traditional clean-room approach involves a s…
View full comment
Metadata
Metadata
Assignees
No one assigned
Labels
No labels
No labels
Type
No type
Fields
No fields configured for issues without a type.
Projects
No projects
Milestone
No milestone
Relationships
None yet
Development
No branches or pull requests