The maintainers of Asahi Linux have disclosed that the project faced repeated attempts to exploit its permissive licensing to take over its work, and said in a progress report for version 7.3 that all of the project's repositories are being relicensed to GPL-2.0-or-later in response.
The Asahi team wrote that some time ago it became aware of "multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work", with the aim of replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, the maintainers said, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of their personal forks and published without attribution, or lazily rewritten with the assistance of large language models.
At the heart of the complaint is the licence Asahi originally shipped under. The MIT licence carries no carve-outs: once code is distributed under its terms, there is no mechanism to claw it back or restrict how downstream users deploy it. The move to relicense every repository to GPL-2.0-or-later is the project's answer to that structural gap, framed in the report with a nod to the old warning that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
The report itself otherwise follows the usual pattern of an Asahi progress update rather than a tagged release — a snapshot of where the project stands in its ongoing bring-up of Apple's hardware under Linux, covering the graphics and display stacks through to the day-to-day desktop experience on machines that no mainstream Linux distribution supports out of the box.
None of the parties alleged to have attempted the appropriation were named, and the report did not say how many such attempts occurred or who was behind them, leaving the identities of the actors an open question pending any further disclosure.
LWN.net carried coverage of the report on 7 November, quoting the disclosure; the full article is linked below.
Source: LWN.net — https://lwn.net/Articles/1105936/
Asahi Linux 維護者披露，項目多次發現有人利用其寬鬆授權條款，企圖接管其成果，並在 7.3 版進度報告中表示，作為回應，項目所有 repository 正在重新授權至 GPL-2.0-or-later。
Asahi 團隊寫道，早前已察覺「有多次嘗試利用我們寬鬆的授權條款來劫持我們的工作」，目的是取而代之，並積極將 Apple Silicon 上的 Linux 商業化。維護者表示，在某些極端情況下，開發中的功能程式碼被人直接從他們的個人 fork 中抽取並在沒有署名的情況下發布，或者借助大型語言模型草草改寫。
爭議的核心在於 Asahi 最初採用的授權條款。MIT 授權沒有任何例外安排：一旦代碼按其條款發布，便沒有機制可以將其追回，亦無法限制下游使用者如何部署。將每個 repository 重新授權至 GPL-2.0-or-later，正是項目對此結構性漏洞的回應，報告中並借古訓點題——不吸取歷史教訓者，注定重蹈覆轍。
報告本身其餘部分沿用 Asahi 進度更新的慣常形式，而非附有版本標籤的正式發布——它是一份快照，展示項目在 Linux 環境下持續 bring-up Apple 硬件的進程，涵蓋圖像及顯示堆疊，以至在主流 Linux 發行版開箱並不支援的機器上的日常桌面體驗。
報告並未點名任何被指嘗試佔用成果的涉事方，亦沒有說明此類嘗試發生了多少次、由誰主使，涉事者的身份在進一步披露前仍然懸而未決。
LWN.net 於 11 月 7 日刊載了該報告的報道，並引述有關披露；全文連結載於下方。
Source: LWN.net — https://lwn.net/Articles/1105936/