alt Hacker News>I personally have a horse in the race here because I too wanted chardet to be under a non-GPL license for many years.
Ugh, it's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or non mentally capable enough to understand what is the purpose of software licenses.
"But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are you like, 8 years old?
Licenses exists for a reason, which is to enforce them. When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a deliberate decision. S/he wants these terms to be reigning over his/her work, in perpetuity. People who pretend they didn't see it or play dumb are in for some well-deserved figuring out.
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This entirely misses the point. Re-implementing code based on API surface and compatibility is established fair use if done properly (Compaq v. IBM, Google v. Oracle). There's nothing wrong with doing that if you don't like a license. What's in question is doing this with AI that may or may not have been trained on the source. In the instance in the article where the result is very different, it's probably in the clear regardless. I'm sympathetic to the author as I generally don't like GPL either outside specific cases where it works well like the Linux kernel.
>Licenses exists for a reason
Yes, and the choice of license for a project is made for a reason that not necessarily everybody agree with.
And the people who don't agree, have every right to implement a similar, even file-format or API compatible, project and give it another license. Gnumeric vs Excel, for example, or forks like MariaDB and Valkey.
But whether they do that alternative licensed project or not, it's perfectly rational, to not like the choice of license the original is in. They legally have to respect it, but that doesn't mean there's anything irational to disliking it or wishing it was changed.
And it's not merely idle wishing: sometimes it can make the original author/vendor to reconsider and switch license. QT is a big example. Blender. Or even proprietary to open (Mozilla to MPL).
"It's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or non mentally capable enough to understand this"
> "But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are you like, 8 years old?
Just because things are not as one wants, does not stop that desire to be there.
> When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a deliberate decision.
Potentially, potentially not. I used to release software under GPL and LGPL but changed my mind a few years after that. I did so in part because of conversations I had with others that convinced me that my values are closer aligned with permissive licenses.
So engaging in a friendly discourse with a maintainer to ask them to relicense is a perfectly fine thing to do and an issue has been with chardet for many, many years on the license.