Episode Details

• chardet ,AI, and licensing
• refined-github
• pgdog: PostgreSQL connection pooler, load balancer and database sharder
• Agentic Engineering Patterns
• Extras
• Joke

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Michael #1: chardet ,AI, and licensing

• Thanks Ian Lessing
• Wow, where to start?
• A bit of legal precedence research.
• Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens on the Register
• Also see this GitHub issue.
• Dan Blanchard, maintainer of a Python character encoding detection library called chardet, released a new version of the library under a new software license. (LGPL → MIT)
• Dan is allowed to make this change because v7 is a complete “clean room” rewrite using AI
• BTW, v7 is WAY better:
  • The result is a 48x increase in detection speed for a project that lives in the hot loops of many projects. That will lead to noticeable performance increases for literally millions of users (the package gets ~130M downloads per month).
  • It paves a path towards inclusion in the standard library (assuming they don’t institute policies against using AI tools).
  • Thread-safe detect() and detect_all() with no measurable overhead; scales on free-threaded Python 3.13t+
• An individual claiming to be Mark Pilgrim, the original creator of the library, opened an issue in the project's GitHub repo arguing that Blanchard had no right to change the software license, citing the LPGL requirement that the license remain unchanged.
• A 'complete rewrite' is irrelevant