Well, well, well…

Asahi Linux is the reason you can run Linux on an Apple Silicon Mac today. For years, the project put most of its own code under the MIT license so that anyone, including the BSDs, could reuse it as needed.

That is changing because Asahi Linux is tired of code laundering. They have announced that Asahi is moving all of its repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward, all Asahi Linux code will be under strong copyleft licenses only.

This is because people were taking in-development code straight out of their personal forks, publishing it without credit, or rewriting it with AI to hide its origin for “replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon.”

What is code laundering?

Code laundering (also called license laundering) is the practice of taking someone else’s code and passing it through a process that hides where it came from, so you can use it without honoring the original license or crediting the author.

Before AI, this usually meant manually rewriting code line by line, renaming variables and stuff, and shuffling functions around until it no longer looked like the original.

LLMs made it much more easy and cheaper of course.

The MIT license only asks you to keep the original copyright notice. It doesn’t require you to share your changes or keep your version open. That’s what makes it popular, and it’s also what made things problematic for Asahi here.

Learning from history

The move has come after the Asahi team was made aware “some time ago” of multiple attempts to exploit its permissive licensing to hijack its work.

In the most extreme cases, feature code that was still under development was lifted from developers’ personal forks before it was even publicly released. The report points out that the MIT license “explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.”

Asahi didn’t name anyone in the report. It also didn’t spell out how existing contributions will be relicensed or whether every past contributor agreed to it.

Asahi draws parallels with WINE’s situation two decades ago. WINE, the compatibility layer that lets you run Windows apps on Linux, was originally MIT-licensed too. But in the late 90s and early 2000s, companies took the code, built proprietary forks on top of it, and sold them commercially. So, in 2002, the WINE team relicensed to the LGPL to discourage proprietary forks and push companies to contribute upstream.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it

Asahi has been upset lately

Asahi didn’t name anyone so we are left with guesswork on who they are targeting with this license move.

There have been at least two public forks of Asahi’s work in recent months, both tied to AI-assisted development. In case you did not know, Asahi Linux forbids AI generated code contribution.

The first is Aurora Silicon and its Vulkan driver, Borealis. Borealis is a fork of Asahi’s HoneyKrisp, the Vulkan driver for Apple GPUs. Aurora Silicon submitted a pull request to register its own Vulkan driver ID with Khronos (VK_DRIVER_ID_AURORA_BOREALIS), says the driver runs on M1 to M5 and the A18 Pro, and keeps it in its own Mesa fork rather than upstream.

The second is Gravity Linux, a Fedora-based distro for Apple Silicon. It was forked from Asahi over the disagreement about LLM use.

To be fair to Gravity, it is open source, it isn’t selling anything, and it credits its AI use openly. It even says it plans to sunset the distro once its driver work lands upstream.

It isn’t the kind of bad actor the progress report describes. But it does represent the “permissive fork that embraces AI” approach that Asahi has consistently pushed back against.

For clarification, Asahi’s progress report does not mention Aurora Silicon or Gravity Linux by name. I have provided their conflict with Asahi as context.

Why this license change matters

As far as I can tell, this is the first time a major open source project has moved to copyleft specifically because of AI-assisted code laundering. Projects have relicensed before, but usually to stop cloud providers from reselling their work as a service. This one is specifically about AI.

I wouldn’t be surprised if more hardware enablement and reverse-engineering projects follow. Making the first changes takes a lot of time and effort but they are easier to “rewrite” once someone has done the hard part.

Will the GPL actually help?

If the problem is people who already ignore the MIT license, why would they respect the GPL? After all, GPL cannot stop a determined bad actor. Nothing does, actually.

Stripping attribution from MIT code already breaks the MIT license, since keeping the copyright notice is its one real condition.

What the GPL changes is the commercial benefit. Under MIT, someone can take Asahi’s code, close it up, and sell a product, and that’s perfectly legal as long as the notice stays in.

Under the GPL, anyone who distributes a modified version has to release the source under the same license. You can’t legally build a closed, paid Apple Silicon distro on top of GPL code. And if a product’s source has to be public, the copying is easier to spot. Not everyone is happy

The move has drawn criticism, particularly from the BSD side, which was one of the main reasons Asahi chose MIT in the first place. OpenBSD’s Apple Silicon support relies on Asahi’s m1n1 bootloader.

OpenBSD developer Bryan Steele wrote on X:

"Sad to see Asahi out there burning bridges for no reason.. relicensing m1n1 and drivers under GPL2-or-later, seemingly without the consent of all prior contributors, under the guise of "defending against AI bad actors", seems entirely disingenuous and misguided."

Wrapping up

Asahi is betting that copyleft license provides a better defense in this changed world where anyone can launder code with a prompt.

It may not stop the bad actors from rewriting its code, but at least it reduces the chances of a closed commercial fork.

It would be interesting to see whether the BSD community finds a way to keep working with Asahi under the new terms.