Dan Blanchard dan-blanchard

Chardet v7.0.0: AI Rewrites Copyleft Out of Existence

Last updated: April 10, 2026

An AI-assisted rewrite of one of Python's most-downloaded libraries has ignited the most consequential open-source licensing crisis in years — and no one agrees on what the law actually says. On March 2, 2026, maintainer Dan Blanchard released chardet 7.0.0 under an MIT license, replacing the LGPL that governed the library since its creation in 2006. He used Anthropic's Claude Code to perform what he calls an independent rewrite. Two days later, original author Mark Pilgrim — who famously disappeared from the internet in 2011 — resurfaced to file GitHub Issue #327, calling the relicensing "an explicit violation of the LGPL." The dispute has since drawn responses from Bruce Perens, the Free Software Foundation, Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez), and dozens of prominent developers, exposing a legal vacuum at the intersection of AI code generation, copyright law, and copyleft

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For ETS's SKLL project, we found out the hard way that Travis-CI's support for numpy and scipy is pretty abysmal. There are pre-installed versions of numpy for some versions of Python, but those are seriously out of date, and scipy is not there are at all. The two most popular approaches for working around this are to (1) build everything from scratch, or (2) use apt-get to install more recent (but still out of date) versions of numpy and scipy. Both of these approaches lead to longer build times, and with the second approach, you still don't have the most recent versions of anything. To circumvent these issues, we've switched to using Miniconda (Anaconda's lightweight cousin) to install everything.

A template for installing a simple Python package that relies on numpy and scipy using Miniconda is provided below. Since it's a common s

I recently needed a way to run unit tests on Travis for a project that uses Sun Grid Engine, Grid Map. Unfortunately, it seemed like no one had figured out how to set that up on Travis before (or simply create a single-machine installation without any user interaction). After hours of trial-and-error, I now know the secrets to making a single-machine installation of SGE that runs on Travis, and I'm sharing my script to prevent other people from going through the same frustrating experience.

To use the install_sge.sh script below, you just need to copy all of the files in this gist to a travis sub-directory directly under the root of your GitHub project, and add the following lines to your .travis.yml

before_install:
  - travis/install_sge.sh
  - export SGE_ROOT=/var/lib/gridengine
  - export SGE_CELL=default
  - export DRMAA_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/libdrmaa.so.1.0

	#!/usr/bin/env python
	'''
	Simple test script to see if we get ValueErrors with joblib and the current
	version of Python
	'''
	import logging
	import sys
	from multiprocessing import cpu_count

	import sklearn.datasets

	#!/usr/bin/env python
	'''
	Little script to set timestamps based on filenames for files uploaded to
	Dropbox by CameraSync.

	:author: Dan Blanchard
	:date: September, 2013
	'''

	from __future__ import print_function, unicode_literals