At 64, Clara Henriksen still keeps a battered laptop beside her kitchen table in Oakland, where she checks bug reports before breakfast. Now she has taken Gannet Forge to federal court in San Jose, arguing that the company’s AI-assisted rewrite of her old software risks breaking a tiny but important behaviour in devices used by utilities and small businesses.
The complaint, filed on 24 September, says the Rust version is being prepared for a firmware update affecting as many as 8.2 million network appliances. Henriksen is seeking credit for her work and a compatibility record before rollout. She says she wants the rewrite to ship—if it can prove it behaves like the original.
The byte the tests missed
Henriksen co-wrote MorrowParse, a compact parser for configuration files, in 1998. Its code is licensed for reuse with attribution. The lawsuit alleges Gannet Forge fed the source into an AI coding system, then released a replacement that carries over distinctive comments and parts of its error-handling logic without naming her.
The dispute centres on a one-byte field in older devices. Henriksen says the C program treats a particular malformed value as an instruction to keep the previous setting; the new Rust version reportedly resets it. That behaviour began as a workaround, she said, but equipment makers built it into systems that can run for years without a full software refresh.
“I don’t want the old code preserved forever,” Henriksen said in an interview. “I want someone to check the corner we know exists before millions of machines get told the new version is the same.”
The complaint says Gannet Forge’s differential-fuzzing tests compared the old and new programs across 6.4 million generated inputs, but missed 11 examples built around that field. Differential fuzzing feeds two programs the same unusual data and checks whether they respond alike. The company’s chief product officer, Akseli Ellilä, said its engineers had not found a confirmed device failure.
A rewrite she wants to finish
Ellilä said the company built the Rust version to reduce memory-safety risks in ageing software, and that it had been tested against published specifications. “We take the compatibility claim seriously, and we are reviewing the specific cases in the filing,” he said. Gannet Forge has paused the broadest rollout while it assesses the complaint, but has not withdrawn the update.
The unexpected turn in Henriksen’s suit is its narrow aim: she is not asking the judge to block the rewrite or demand a royalty. She wants attribution restored and a public test record showing which devices have been checked. Her lawyers also ask the court to preserve the original source and the tests used to compare the two versions.
Henriksen spent years maintaining MorrowParse without pay, answering questions from device makers who had found it bundled inside products. She says she once hoped the library would fade away. But after hearing that millions of devices could switch versions in one update, she began running the old and new programs side by side at home.
A federal judge has set a hearing for 6 October on Henriksen’s request to preserve the code and test results. The case could also test how copyright rules apply when AI tools help translate software into a new language. For Henriksen, the immediate measure is simpler: whether a device remembers its last safe setting after one strange byte arrives.
