If Blanchard is claiming not to have been substantively involved in the creation of the new implementation of chardet (i.e. "Claude did it"), then the new implementation is machine generated, and in the USA cannot be copyright and thus cannot be licensed.
If he is claiming to have been somehow substantively "enough" involved to make the code copyrightable, then his own familiarity with the previous LGPL implementation makes the new one almost certainly a derivative of the original.
>then his own familiarity with the previous LGPL implementation makes the new one almost certainly a derivative of the original.
The "clean room rewrite" is just an extreme way to have a bulletproof shield against litigation. Not doing it that way doesn't automatically make all new code he writes derivative solely because he saw how the code worked previously.
If the clean room re-write was done entirely by Claude, then the result cannot be copyright in the USA, and thus there is no license at all.
And if he was in fact more involved (which he appears to deny) that it's a bit weak to say that someone with huge familiarity with chardet could choose to reimplement chardet without the result being derivative.
So if I read any LGPL code in my life, I can never think about working on something similar in my life?
There's a difference between "I've read a LGPL code once, maybe I could do something similar" and "I've been reading this LGPL code for 12 years and now I'm going to do exactly the same thing".