Asahi Linux moves from MIT to GPL, citing AI code laundering

Asahi Linux is moving all of its code from MIT to GPL v2 or later. James Calligeros, a maintainer, wrote the announcement on 7 November. It is in the project's seventh progress report. Asahi runs Linux on Apple silicon Macs.

The reason is not the usual one for a copyleft switch. Calligeros writes that the project saw "multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work". The goal, he says, was "replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon". Two patterns are named in the report.

What forks were doing

Code from the maintainers' personal branches was lifted and republished with no credit. Other code was, in his words, "lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin". A model would rewrite a file until an outside reader could not see that it came from Asahi.

What is changing

Every new file will be GPL v2 or later. The report says Asahi code will be covered by "strong copyleft licences only" from now on. The report calls this a process, not a single switch. No effective date is given. No forks are named.

What is left open

Calligeros does not list the repositories, the schedule, or what will happen to contributors who sent their patches under MIT. A fork that already copied MIT code can keep using it under those terms. The switch covers new code and new releases.

OpenBSD developer Bryan Steele told It's FOSS the relicensing happened "seemingly without the consent of all prior contributors". A full relicense of an open project normally needs each contributor's agreement. The report does not say how Asahi will handle old patches.

The report names a wider cause. It points to "the insatiable appetite of frontier AI labs for high-quality training data". The same sentence calls out "militant animosity toward the Free Software community". No AI lab is named.

A maintainer who signs up for MIT accepts that a fork can sell a product built on the code. What Asahi describes is a step past that. A fork rewrites the code with a model until the author cannot prove it is theirs. GPL does not stop a copy. It forces any redistributed version to keep the same terms. For a project whose output is read by model trainers, that enforcement step is the point.

Source

Asahi Linux progress report 7.3 by James Calligeros. Reaction from Bryan Steele via It's FOSS.