The Asahi Linux project announced they are transitioning from the MIT license to the GPL license to combat “bad faith actors.”
Asahi Linux is the project responsible for reverse engineering the drivers for Apple Silicon chips to make it possible to run Linux on modern Macs. The project has proven to be something of an engineering marvel, giving Mac owners options they otherwise would not have had.
Until now, Asahi was licensed under the permissive MIT license, but the project devs have seen that permissiveness being abused by bad actors, as they outline in a blog post.
When Asahi Linux was first started, it was with the intent that we develop a Free Software ecosystem for the Apple Silicon platform. To facilitate and encourage the participation of our friends at the BSDs and other Free Software operating systems, we endeavoured to licence as much of our code as possible under the permissive MIT licence.
Unfortunately, this is no longer viable. The malicious practices of the 90s and 2000s have reared their ugly heads once again, this time driven in large part by both the insatiable appetite of frontier AI labs for high-quality training data, and militant animosity toward the Free Software community.
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.
The project devs have begun moving all of their repositories to the GPL v2 or later in an effort to thwart such behavior.
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.
Asahi’s challenges illustrate the growing issues open source projects are facing as a result of AI.
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