> 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.

> As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

I appreciate all of the hard work that's gone into Asahi linux, but this statement is basically nonsensical. Making the license copyleft does not prevent people from monetizing it, using AI to develop on it, improve it or wreck it. All it does is make sure that anyone who does will share their source code modifications.

It doesn't sound like they want their code to be open source. It sounds like they want it to be closed source or at least restrictively licensed enough that they can tell users of the source how they're allowed to interact with it and modify it.

The entire point of open source / free software is that it lets you do what you want with it. The original author doesn't need to accept your AI patches or write AI code themselves, but downstream users are not restricted.

I am just baffled by how confused even very smart people seem to be about how open source and permissive licenses work and what they are for.

(Now, should they use trademark law to ensure others can't use the name Asahi Linux confusingly? Absolutely. But that's got nothing to do with copyright.)

You are right, it does not help against code laundering. I consider it a strategic decision to bolster the copyleft/FOSS ecosystem against the closed free-for-all laundering bonanza on the horizon; protectionism against the devaluation of software.

GPL is notoriously frowned upon when it comes to adoption in commercial environment (to a point where GPL licensed software is not allowed to be included in any way whatsoever). In that light I could see this as an attempt of a poison pill to prevent commercialization of their code by means of this "stigma" that is attached to the license itself. So a commercial entity cannot create an asahi alternative (or attach pieces of it to their own product) and charge money for it due to their legal dep telling them big no just because GPL is involved.

Maybe they should have stated this a bit clearer, but I believe "attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work" does not mean that a fellow developper tried to distribute a modified version of their work under an open license to the benefit of users.

I believe instead it means: some shaddy businesses tried to hastily build a clunky, closed source product with which to fool less technical users into some sort of technical dead-end that could be commercially (or politically, it's 2026) exploited.

Or maybe I project on them my own frustrations with the MIT license. In any case, I welcome the change consisting on puting freedom back in the front seat.

They’re switching to GPL and you think that’s anti-open source? MIT has basically zero restrictions and assumes a good-faith collaboration environment. GPL is more realistic about the motives of much of the tech world, and in practice is much more encouraging of collaborative, open, and free software development. Kudos to them on making the switch.

You are confusing why 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), they understand well the implications as anyone else.

> I appreciate all of the hard work that's gone into Asahi linux

Actually no, you don't seem to. Regardless of the license, remind yourself that they didn't lose ownership of what they did. They can still be disgusted at how people are building lazy derivatives just because they wanted to share what they did with a different kind of developers. I know I would.

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