Chardlet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing

A dispute over the chardet Python library has ignited a broader debate about AI's impact on software licensing. Maintainer Dan Blanchard used Anthropic's Claude to rewrite the library and relicensed it from LGPL to MIT, claiming a clean-room implementation. Critics, including someone claiming to be the original author, argue this violates copyleft obligations. Open source figures like Bruce Perens and Armin Ronacher see this as a sign that AI makes copyleft unenforceable and could upend the entire economics of software development—both proprietary and open source—since any codebase can now be trivially reimplemented. The Free Software Foundation warns that LLMs trained on copyleft code cannot produce truly clean-room outputs, while Perens argues the horse is already out of the barn and software licensing as we know it may be obsolete.