> Unfortunately, the license allows this.

No, it's unfortunate that the authors didn't understand the license they used. It is not unfortunate that the license allows this use since that's the entire purpose of its existence, and is one of the most advantageous to users.

Framing adherence to the license as "bad actors" is just ridiculous emotional bias. Use a more restrictive license if you want to restrict the use of your code.

LLM haters are the worst type of toxic; they will not stop until everyone else stops using it, too.

Punitively changing a license with an intent to further restrict what someone does with the code is childish. If the concern is "someone will feed it into an LLM to obfuscate it" — what stops them from doing that with GPL code?

GPL code is, by the way, ripped off on a daily basis and routinely ignored because it's bordering on impossible to enforce.

it's not like icloud's website stops working

I just ran this the other day on a new setup: https://github.com/osx-tools/asahi-encrypt Worked well.

I mean, for sure, if they are worried about someone building a shoddy product on top of asahi, and then not open sourcing their shoddy additions then GPL will fix their problem.

However, I think, what they want is for people to stop making those shoddy additions altogether. And open source does not solve that problem because that's exactly what open source exists to allow.

Very specifically, it was (allegedly) DDH. He's got some VC funding and all now, and is making some linux distro for MacBooks.

No, I am saying the maintainers are saying they're mad that people are using AI to extend Asahi, and in response they are switching to GPL.

Normally you do something in response that would solve your perceived problem. In this case, it seems to be a random unrelated action they've taken to the problem they identified.

> they choose MIT (to further adoption by other existing distributions and allow other developers to reuse pieces) and how it is being used (to build cheap distributions on it slapping a different name on front)

The former and latter are nearly equivalent to both licenses AND everyone can still make cheap distributions with a different name slapped on top.

They only chose GPL because Omarchy is MIT and they _hate_ Omarchy.

> Frankly, I'm not sure if permissive licenses have a future. No one wants dev marketeer to save tokens reusing their work.

On the contrary, the AI shift means that devs who are concerned about enforcing the purity of their community and stymieing marketeers will be vastly outnumbered by people who just want to “move fast and fix things” (which is essentially what Omarchy represents)

They can still be disgusted at how people are building lazy derivatives

If you're disgusted at the prospect of people you don't like using and extending your code, then open source is not for you.

I do genuinely appreciate the hard work, and I don't appreciate being told what I appreciate.

Regardless, I think you're also confused.

"How it is being used ... to build cheap distributions on it slapping a different name on front"

I'm sorry but this is literally exactly the thing GPL is designed to allow. I don't understand why this is so confusing.

Copyleft is designed to prevent people from improving on the code and then keeping their changes secret and closed source. That's not what Omarchy or anyone else is doing, they're all already sharing their changes.

Let's walk through it from the Asahi linux perspective so we're all on the same page:

- Asahi makes software licensed MIT

- Omarchy takes that software, slops the AI-iest slop on top.

- Omarchy releases the source code of those changes to Omarchy's users.

- Asahi is mad because they hate AI, but they have no recourse unless Omarchy violates their trademark.

Now compare how it works under GPL:

- Asahi makes software licensed GPL

- Omarchy takes that software, slops the AI-iest slop on top.

- Omarchy releases the source code of those changes to Omarchy's users.

- Asahi is mad because they hate AI, but they have no recourse unless Omarchy violates their trademark.

The entire section "Kept you waiting, huh?" is about this and some of the background is really interesting explaining why things are as they are. Here's just the last bit:

> Luckily for us, Sven was up to the task of dealing with all this nonsense. It just took slightly longer than expected! While the patchset to enable Thunderbolt was sent upstream first (another massive win for us!), we have also pulled it into our downstream kernel and are now shipping it to users!

> But there is a catch. Currently, only USB3, XDomain and Thunderbolt Networking are supported. You can plug in USB devices or connect two Thunderbolt computers together and make them ping each other, but that’s about it. PCIe and DisplayPort tunnelling — required for most Thunderbolt docks — are not supported. Yet. Watch this space.

> An enormous amount of gratitude is owed to Sven, who has stuck with this thankless chore for nearly 5 years in between all of his other incredible work.

Thank you, Sven!

> no luks fde support

You can get an "unecrypted boot, encrypted root" setup though.

https://davidalger.com/posts/fedora-asahi-remix-on-apple-sil...

Did you consider that? I am personally using that and feeling pretty good about it, but maybe I am missing something?

Huh. Thank you for the info!

I am always looking at this "Device Support" page [1] and it's still red there. I even have a calendar reminder to check it out every once in a while, but if it's not being updated I might drop my calendar reminder then :)

[1] https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support

Permissive licences require attribution. They clearly state that there have been cases where their code was published without attribution.

The only thing you ask with a permissive licence is attribution. Why would it not make sense to you that they want it honoured?

>It makes no sense to me why you'd adopt MIT in the first place for its permissiveness, and then be surprised that people you don't like are using your code

It makes no sense to me that this makes no sense to you. The Asahi Linux project kicked off in December 2020. About 2 years before the first ChatGPT (Nov 2022). It had a lot of ideals including working with the BSDs at the time, and so they surveyed the landscape and considered the downsides at the time vs the upsides and decided a BSD approach was the right tradeoff. Now, 6 years later, the landscape has changed pretty radically, so they've decided that the downsides have gone up and any value they're getting from the BSDs is not high enough, so they're changing course. This is not hard to follow.

>It's like being a free speech supporter and being surprised that people say things you find abhorrent

No, it's nothing like this at all. Though utterly tortured, convoluted and wrong analogies to free speech are common from people who don't understand it.

>If you only support speech you agree with, you don't believe in free speech, and if you only support code being developed by people you agree with, then you don't believe in free software.

It is apparent that you are overloading "support". Free speech is about opposing the use of violence (direct or indirect) to decide debates as a near-universal default. That's it. Social and economic consequences unbacked by violence are not opposed to free speech, they ARE free speech themselves. If I think your opinion is wrong and stupid, I may "defend to death your right to say it" but then not invite you over to dinner, donate you any money/time/resources to get your message out further, etc etc. That is my own personal free speech in response to yours. And you can criticize that in turn and not invite me and so on and so forth. Free speech preserves this unending dynamic.

By the same token, believing in "free software" is easily overloaded, and claiming that using the GPL means someone doesn't believe in free software like you just did is one of the most absurd and also ancient, tired bad faith attacks that's been around for decades. It diminishes you to make it.

> Apple makes very high-quality hardware, and unlocking the full capability of that hardware via strong Linux support is absolutely a noble cause.

That is highly unlikely to happen. See proprietary GPU drivers.

I bought multiple ThinkPads with "official Linux support" that had diverse, show-stopping bugs. Because Lenovo is a difficult partner (for one, their service centers don't test against Linux) I don't hesitate anymore to instantly return a new computer if it has even minor bugs while running Fedora or Ubuntu. If ANY feasible alternative to Lenovo existed, I would've switched five years ago.

Because sometimes people don’t go out of their way to buy Linux but want to repurpose old stuff they already own to experiment a bit and/or extend its life? For instance, I recently installed Ubuntu on my 10yo Intel MBP from 2015, and had to tweak lots of things to get it to a somewhat usable state that doesn’t flicker/tear/freeze. Had to use X11 instead of Wayland for anything Chromium-based. One of the most amusing ones (for some definition of amusing) is Bluetooth audio not working, turns out Ubuntu uses hot garbage codec that can’t fit into the available bandwidth due to AAC licensing (?), possibly among other problems, and switching to an AAC-enabled build made it reasonably stable.

Wild to limit yourself to what the manufacturers “officially support”. May as well just run macOS with that attitude.

No need for snide remarks. That "every other laptop" company runs stock x86 which has been documented and supported by Linux since day zero. Dealing with custom Apple hardware is a major fuck-you from too many angles.

Wanting stuff to work is a valid reason to not use AI for more sophisticated development projects. Having a computer that kernel panics once every three days is useless to me, even if it works for you.

> they have stubbornly refused to use AI

And by the looks of it, they're very intent on gatekeeping. Deep down I don't like AI either, it has taken away a lot of what I love about coding. But it's here to stay. What if we can use it to wrestle hardware control away from Apple and other authoritarian vendors? Hell yes, we should.

The likely problem with the Asahi team is that they (by not accepting AI) feel that control is being wrestled away from them, and instead of adapting they choose to swallow the poison pill of GPL.

We might not like it, coding as it was pre-LLM is done for. No one is going to come groveling at the feet of those who stubbornly insist on not using it.

There is no "stubbornly", the project is theirs and they do the f they want, their reasoning is sound. Permissive license does not mean that you cannot speak out about what people are doing with your software.

Do you think there would have been something working on mac if omarchy didn't start from the solid foundation of Asahi? Please don't make me laugh too hard.

So why those people using AI do not write the code from scratch without breaking the license and without vibe-copying existing code?

They're referring to Omarchy, it's very clear on their IRC

Omarchy has gotten somewhat of a reputation for getting a lot of sponsorship money from commercial actors. If by monetize you mean "Get people to pay us" omarchy are definitely monetizing. Not much different to Asahi themselves of course, but is it right/moral to fork another active projects code and use it in order to gain your own patrons? I don't hold the answers. But no they aren't selling anything.

edit: worth noting this example, where DigitalOcean started cutting OSS support only to pledge millions of dollars to Omarchy. No wonder people consider the project a leech to the OSS community, but also consider correlation != causation: https://itsfoss.com/news/digitalocean-open-source-credits-en...

They do have large entities donating to them

Omarchy is itself MIT licensed, with no restrictions that I'm aware of. If they later decide to make a paid version or something, the license wouldn't stop them, I think. But GPL would. All in all, I think it's a dumb move from Asahi because their GPL'd code will soon be eaten up LLMs that don't give a damn about licensing anyway.

The same LLMs you have to rent from the very richest people on earth? I would be careful to call that freedom

They say:

> In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin.

Permissive licences require attribution. It's okay to complain when people publish your permissively-licenced work without attribution, and hence without honouring the licence.

They explain that they expected that MIT licensed code would encourage contributions from BSD OSes

I agree it was a poor choice of license and that GPL helps build a better community, I'm glad they mad ethe license choice

Because permissive licensing, and free software in general, rightfully comes with a certain cachet, and it turns out some people want the benefits of that reputation, but don’t actually believe in the freedom “to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose.” Hence the treadmill from permissive licensing to copyleft, and then later from copyleft to “source available”…

“But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.”

—Theo de Raadt (2001)

Of course you can, its like putting candy for Halloween on the expectation that one kid is not going to get the whole bowl at once.

The way you can exploit an open license is to grab the code, invest massive amounts of resources in it and close the platform. Embrace, extend, and extinguish.

From TFA:

> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.

They are mad that vibecoders are building on top of their work, making real progress, then re-releasing it as "look it works" while containing a bunch of their work. Which is sort of fair but I don't get how that works in practice because in reality anyone can read the code which is open source and do whatever they want. Licensing won't stop them.

Right, this seems deeply confused. If you care about how your code is used, don’t use MIT. Especially, if you care about monetization, probably use GPL or AGPL.

Hasn't been shipped yet, integration is being done now, we're shipping a new installer, from scratch graphics driver, and new kernel so there's a lot of moving parts we want to get right.

It's vibe-coded slop. Probably the reason why the Asahi team wanted to exclude these contributions in the first place.

I wholeheartedly agree. If I think about it, I must have thought "god I wish this ran Linux" at least once every single time I opened my MacBook - likely for the last several years.

I have run Asahi and while I love the project, it's not ready for that type of use.

Recently, I got a new MacBook and repurposed my old M1 MacBook Pro for local inference. The unbelievable number of compromises and hacks you need to do to run daemonized always-on software on MacOS was another reminder.

> I feel like it's a fundamental to human happiness. Software that takes that away contributes to the general malaise and hopelessness that many are feeling today.

I would like to see a full-featured Linux on Apple hardware too, but I think over 99% of people don't feel anywhere near this strongly. Do you feel this strongly about being able to replace the engine in your car with one you made yourself? I don't, and I think most people view computers the same way.

Sometimes it can be good to have two teams work independently towards a common goal. I'm sure they'll learn a lot from each other.

Vulkan 1.4 on the GPU, D3D12, full AAA gaming support

> Cool, I'm glad someone is taking a more aggressive and LLM friendly approach to doing Linux on Mac

Same. I've been waiting 6 years to run no-compromises Linux on my MacBook. At this point, I don't care if someone uses LLM decompiled firmware ported to Linux.

Omarchy works on M3 with GPU acceleration.

Works! The code is public at https://github.com/GravityLinux/linux

We also have vrr!

Don't bother. Just check his replies. I would not trust him with my hardware, software and data.

You must not work with AI tools very much. The brute force approach as a first/second pass is very standard when doing reverse engineering with AI. You get the functionality figured out and get the basics working and then you just iterate on that and massage it into what you need it to be. Omarchy has practically unlimited tokens and every other week there is a new model being released that is more captable than the previous that will just massage things into place with each iteration.

who are "they" here?

clean room RE is legal across the world. with AI, it is increasingly easier to do it right.

> And yes, there's a reckoning coming for AI companies who trained their models on GPL software.

What would that look like in your opinion? Hard to fathom that the people with all the money and power could get into trouble over a licensing dispute.

> But the fact of the matter is, if somebody else is getting paid based on your work, and you aren't being compensated your fair share, that's extractive and abusive.

GPL doesn't prevent that at all. That's not why Asahi made that change. It's about contributing back to the project, not the money they want to see.

A reckoning for what? I've also read some GPL source, doesn't mean I'm not allowed to publish closed source software, as long as I'm not copying anything.

> But the fact of the matter is, if somebody else is getting paid based on your work, and you aren't being compensated your fair share, that's extractive and abusive.

That is not a fact at all. I choose to use permissive licenses because I am giving my work to the public out of charity. If someone uses it to turn a profit, and I never see a dime, I have not been exploited or abused in the least degree. It would certainly be virtuous for the people making a profit to give something back, but it isn't required. If I did require that, it wouldn't be much of a gift.

The inverse judo throw of GPL also turning free software advocates into copyright maximalists is quite unfortunate.

It doesn't change the matter of fact that it's insulting language, and I downvoted it either way.

Developers have their own good reasons to stick with permissive licenses. Either because they are completely selfless, or they want to help users who want to kick-start their own business selling software. Just virtuous reasons.

The person who can still dunk if the the other one sits down

Well with omarchy specifically it feels a lot more like an weight around LeBron's neck—they've vibe coded up a storm without seemingly producing any value beyond dotfiles. That's a liability in net. Just use asahi alarm and dodge the vibe-coded screensavers.

That's a very complex question that entirely depends on who you're trying to defend from, more than I can explain in a single comment.

The short of it is that you can make it relatively secure, but it will never reach the same levels of security as macOS. The tight integration apple has allows them to do far more for security, for better and for worse.

Worse being apple putting the entire might of the platform's security into making sure the Chess app can't be uninstalled or tampered with.

> Install from MacOS

> `curl https://alx.sh | sh`

https://asahilinux.org/

Of course not. Everyone knows you've got to do

    curl | sudo bash

It really depends. I'd say here it's warranted because idk how one would `brew install asahi-linux`.

If it's someone's fuckass vibecoded app though, just why.

Ah yeah, a .dmg installer that asks for sudo permissions is much safer /s

Why do people get hung op on this so much? You can just read the script before running it. Of course you won’t though, just like you don’t read the source of the .dmg installer.

True. Was Omarchy doing that? (I'm confused why changing the license matters, if both projects are already open source and releasing all the code to the public anyways)

True, but knowing why they went GPL, it is hilarious. They had MIT and they were mad about another MIT-licensed project using their work.

Also, they say this:

> with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon

which I hope everyone knows is completely dishonest. Nothing in Omarchy is about monetizing Linux; and monetizing Linux is and has been completely fine since its inception.

Asahi people just seem to be sour that someone else is joining the initiative but in a different project where AI use is encouraged to get to the same goal faster.

Great, I thank them for open sourcing it and letting others build off of it. Their anti AI stance is political and childish and I look forward to the forks that created from their existing work: https://asahilinux.org/llm-policy/

The patches to the Linux kernel have been about 50% made by AI in the past 6 months. The magic of open source is you can just fork it and go at your own pace and do whatever you want, and others can embrace whatever technology they want and then market adoption just speaks for whichever is superior.

How is making your project better — more feature complete, more secure, more performant and optimized — going in a bad direction? This is all platitudes and virtue signaling. Give me substantive reasons LLM “slop” is worse than human “slop”.

People outside Asahi are making M4/M5/M6 work. Pretty soon Omarchy will support M1-M6 while Asahi will only support M1-M3.

Nah, just love the project and hate the political gatekeepers. Looks like Asahi came out officially with their anti AI stance: https://asahilinux.org/llm-policy/

Isn’t Darwin open sourced? 26 years ago, no one’s picked up the gauntlet, what more help do you need?

Yet building their own silicon/with your in-house Linux distro would be the quickest and easiest way. Solving the need…

> - MacBooks are still among the nicest if not the nicest laptops hardware-wise, so some people like to run Linux on it.

By the time said macbook is fully supported, it is in sorry state. Judging by what I found when looking for second hand laptops, macbooks don't age well.

[flagged]