Asahi Linux is moving all of its repositories from MIT to GPL-2.0-or-later, It’s FOSS reports, after spotting bad actors lifting in-development code from personal forks and publishing it without credit, sometimes after running it through an LLM to hide the origin.
Why
- MIT allows reuse with a copyright notice, but it doesn’t stop someone from closing up the code and selling an Apple Silicon distro.
- Asahi’s progress report compares it to the 1990s, when permissively licensed projects were treated as free real estate. LLMs just made the rewrite cheaper.
- GPL’s copyleft means you can’t legally ship a closed, paid fork on top of that code, and public source makes the copying easier to spot.
- Asahi already forbids AI-generated contributions. They didn’t name the actors.
My take
Copyleft isn’t a silver bullet against bad faith, but it changes the economics. If you’re shipping anything on Apple Silicon Linux, read the Asahi progress report and their LLM policy before you pull code.
God Bless, and May the Source Be with You!
