Asahi Linux ditches MIT licence for GPL after attempts to hijack its Apple Silicon work

Asahi Linux, the community project that ports Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, has announced it is transitioning all of its repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later, abandoning the permissive MIT license under which much of its code was previously released. The project said the move was made “with a heavy heart”, but that keeping its work under a permissive license was “no longer viable” given what it describes as malicious efforts to hijack and commercially exploit the codebase.

According to the announcement, the team became aware of multiple attempts to exploit the MIT licensing to effectively replace the project and aggressively monetize Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, the developers say, in-development feature code was lifted directly from personal forks and republished without attribution, or “lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin”. The project pinned the blame on the “insatiable appetite of frontier AI labs for high-quality training data” combined with what it called “militant animosity toward the Free Software community”.

The decision echoes a pivotal moment in Free Software history: in 2002, the WINE project relicensed from the MIT license to the LGPL after commercial proprietary forks threatened to fragment the ecosystem. Asahi Linux had originally chosen MIT in part to encourage collaboration from the BSDs and other Free Software operating systems, but now says strong copyleft is the only way to protect its work. “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”, the announcement concluded.