Chardet Maintainers Relicense Project Under MIT

On March 4, maintainer Dan Blanchard released chardet 7.0.0, claiming a ground-up rewrite and relicensing the project from LGPL 2.1 to MIT. Original author Mark Pilgrim and other contributors dispute the relicensing, arguing the rewrite was not a clean-room implementation and that AI-assisted generation implicates LGPL obligations. The dispute raises legal and ethical questions about derivative works, AI-generated code, and open-source license compliance.