Did AI Rewrite & Break Open Source?

A licensing controversy has erupted in the open source community after Chardet, a Python character encoding detection library previously under LGPL, was rewritten using AI and re-released under the more permissive MIT license. The original author Mark Pilgrim has publicly objected, arguing this constitutes an LGPL violation since the maintainers had full exposure to the original code, making it a derivative work rather than a clean-room implementation. An Nvidia employee also weighed in, calling the relicensing 'toxic' from a corporate risk perspective and urging the maintainers to retract the release and fork instead. The broader concern is that LLMs dramatically lower the cost of rewrites, potentially enabling widespread 'license laundering' of copyleft projects. The Linux kernel mailing list has already begun discussing how to handle LLM-driven packages with questionable licensing. Community consensus leans toward viewing AI as just a tool that grants no new legal rights, but courts have yet to rule on whether AI-assisted rewrites constitute derivative works.