Hi, I’m Mark Pilgrim. You may remember me from classics like “Dive Into Python” and “Universal Character Encoding Detector”. I am the original author of this chardet. First of all, I would like to thank the current maintainers and all those who have 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 release 7.0.0, the maintainers claim to have the right to “re-license” the project. They have no such rights; Doing so is a clear violation of the LGPL. Licensed code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that this “complete rewrite” is irrelevant, as they had substantial experience with the originally licensed code (ie it is not a “clean room” implementation). Adding a fancy code generator to the mix doesn’t give them any extra rights in any way.
I respectfully insist that they revert this project to its original license.
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