> 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

Um, no... MIT requires that the license text be included. That's attribution, because you normally put your name or the name of your organization in there. You can't just take MIT code and have AI rewrite it without attribution, at least, you need to do some kind of air gap or something, and lawyers might poke holes in that too. I'm sure people are doing it though. But GPL won't save you from that.

But I do understand why they want to move to GPL, to block out scammers who want to make closed-source forks and charge money for them.

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wmf 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

scammers who want to make closed-source forks and charge money for them

I've yet to see evidence that this is real.

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cowlevel 2 days ago | parent [-]

Amazon with ElasticSearch?

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wmf 2 days ago | parent [-]

Sorry, I meant for Asahi specifically.

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trombuance a day ago | parent [-]

Rumor is that the change was made because of Omarchy. There is controversy over the use of AI-written code though I suspect the real reason is political and they don't like the people behind the Omarchy project.

Either way, I don't presume any good faith actor will have an issue with the GPL license. Just seems like pointless posturing. The usual Linux drama.

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KetoManx64 a day ago | parent [-]

Omarchy.. That free and completely open source project that has brought tens of thousands of new people to Linux in the last year and has received millions of dollars in sponsorships to just make good project?

	▲	bigyabai a day ago \| parent [-]
		Omarchy isn't contributing to Linux development, though. Donating to Omarchy doesn't help put code in the Linux kernel, it just creates more tech debt for their distro. Viral licenses like the GPL are a shot across the bow for anyone foisting downstream code and laundering it as their own features. Omarchy can still use Asahi's upstream code, but they generally shouldn't take credit for downstream work.

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charcircuit 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If the code is trivial, not copyrightable, you do not have to follow the license.

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rerdavies a day ago | parent | next [-]

Trivial has to be pretty trivial. Google was found by a jury to have infringed Oracle's copyright on 9 lines of source code (the RangeCheck function). Although that fact did get lost in surrounding rulings and appeals relating to a further 11,500 lines of API declarations. The legal criteria for what's trivial is subjective and not well defined at all. And the legal costs for finding out what is or is not trivial can easily run into millions of dollars.

If I were you, I would not copy even truly "trivial" amounts of code.

	▲	conartist6 a day ago \| parent [-]
		I am no lawyer but I am law-curious, so I went looking for more info on rangeCheck. As we all know AI erases liability, but I'm a poor old human still trying to compete with AI and I do have legal liability so I guess I still have to think about what the rules mean, eh? Here's my thing: Oracle v Google was a fight that ended up being about two specific things, one was whether API-declaring interface code could be a subject of copyright law. Once it was found that interfaces could be copyrighted the lawsuit turned its focus to thing two: whether Google's use was fair use. The part of copyright law, as written, that protects your ability to copy a 9-line RangeCheck function, is NOT, emphatically NOT fair use. It is convergence, the least-known of all the copyright principles. Convergence says that if many people not coordinating could be expected to all land on the same results, then logically the activity must not be creative expression and the result must not be possible to copyright. This is why nobody owns math equations like e=mc^2. It's not that no creativity was required to derive the equation, it's that anyone working at it would end up with a result of that form. In programming this would protect you when you do something like write a parser for a programming language, or implement a common helper function. Anything where you may, through now fault of your own, do work that creates a result similar to work that someone else has already done. I don't know that any significant court case has ever even had arguments based on convergence even though it's the most practical shield most of us have most of the time.

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digitalsquare 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Doesn't the concept of what is trivial shift with what is possible with LLMs?

	▲	cowlevel 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Doubt it. If you needed an LLM to launder it it's surely not trivial. Trivial is any well known code pattern for example. "for(int j=0; j<ARRAY_SIZE(a); j++) total += a[j];" - you could copy paste this and more out of leaked Windows source code and it still wouldn't be a copyright violation. But beware that a sum of a large number of trivialities can be not trivial.
	▲	rerdavies a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I would be worried about transformation via LLM being considered a "trivial transformation". Trivial transformations do not remove the original copyright. All completely unsettled law at this point. And, as a general guiding principle, you do NOT want to be one of the people who pays millions in legal fees and court costs to find out, whether you are right or wrong.