Slopforks: what happens when a library gets rewritten with AI?

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Armin Ronacher

AI is making it trivially cheap to rewrite existing software from scratch using only APIs and test suites, raising thorny questions about copyright, licensing, and authorship. The chardet library case illustrates this: its maintainer used an AI coding agent to rewrite it from scratch to relicense it from LGPL to MIT, prompting objections from the original author who considers it a derived work. This trend — dubbed 'slopforks' — could erode copyleft enforcement since GPL relies on copyright friction that AI now bypasses. It also raises unresolved questions about whether AI-generated code can even be copyrighted, and whether we'll see waves of GPL software re-emerging under permissive licenses or proprietary abandonware revived as open source. The author, a permissive-license advocate, sees this as exciting but acknowledges it will spark fights combining two already contentious topics: AI and software licensing.

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