No right to relicense this project

Source: Hacker News

Message from the original author

Hi, I’m Mark Pilgrim. You may remember me from such classics as Dive Into Python and Universal Character Encoding Detector. I am the original author of chardet. First off, I would like to thank the current maintainers and everyone who has contributed to and improved this project over the years. Truly a Free Software success story.

However, it has been brought to my attention that, in the release 7.0.0, the maintainers claim to have the right to “relicense” the project. They have no such right; doing so is an explicit violation of the LGPL. Licensed code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a “complete rewrite” is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a “clean room” implementation). Adding a fancy code generator into the mix does not somehow grant them any additional rights.

I respectfully insist that they revert the project to its original license.