Claude Code riscrive chardet ("Python character encoding detector") con prestazioni 48 volte superiori alla versione precedente. La licenza open source cambia da LGPL a MIT perché è un rewrite totale. È un lavoro indipendente oppure un lavoro derivato? La questione si ripresenterà sempre più spesso.
Last week, Dan Blanchard, the maintainer of chardet—a Python library for detecting text encodings used by roughly 130 million projects a month—released a new version. Version 7.0 is 48 times faster than its predecessor, supports multiple cores, and was redesigned from the ground up. Anthropic's Claude is listed as a contributor. The license changed from LGPL to MIT.
Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly. He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch. The resulting code shares less than 1.3% similarity with any prior version, as measured by JPlag. His conclusion: this is an independent new work, and he is under no obligation to carry forward the LGPL.