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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