[simonw]

I think that's one of the most important details here.

From a moral perspective Dan wanting to relicense the project carries much more weight give his many years of contribution.

From a practical perspective the reason the rewrite went so well (significant performance boost, virtually no duplicate code) speaks to his skill and experience with the domain.

It's also a cause of friction here, because the fact that he knows the codebase so well makes him less credible as a clean-room implementer - his own biological neural weights are deeply biased by what he's learned from that existing code.

[digitalPhonix]

He’s not claiming the rewrite is a clean room implementation. In fact he’s explicitly saying it is not:

> However, the purpose of clean-room methodology is to ensure the resulting code is not a derivative work of the original. It is a means to an end, not the end itself. In this case, I can demonstrate that the end result is the same — the new code is structurally independent of the old code — through direct measurement rather than process guarantees alone.

[simonw]

That's a good note, yeah. Dan isn't claiming a pure clean room approach here.