The Lock Breaks Downward

When a lock breaks, things fall. But they don't fall evenly. I published a piece about fragile constraints — protections that depend on friction rather than being intrinsic to the medium they protect. Copyleft that relies on "rewriting is expensive." Security boundaries that assume "humans write the inputs." Competitive moats built on "reimplementation costs too much." AI dissolves the friction, and the lock evaporates. The responses taught me something the original piece missed. I was asking "what breaks?" The better question is "who's standing underneath?" The Maintainer's Position Dan Blanchard spent years maintaining chardet — a Python character detection library carrying LGPL copyleft. When he released chardet 7.0 as a ground-up rewrite with a new license, the copyleft obligation became renegotiable. That's the fact I reported in Fragile Constraints. Here's the fact I didn't report: a maintainer who invests years in an LGPL library has made a specific bet. They traded immediate co