Simon Willison: Richard Fontana on chardet 7.0.0 — Open Source Licensing Dispute Over LGPL Obligations in AI-Era Dependency Chains
Simon Willison·low signal
Simon Willison surfaces open source licensing attorney Richard Fontana's analysis that chardet 7.0.0 may not actually be required to be released under LGPL, challenging the assumption that Mark Pilgrim's original LGPL licensing persists across forks. This niche licensing dispute is relevant because chardet has massive downstream dependency reach and LGPL compliance in AI pipelines (where model weights interact with library code) is an unsettled legal area.