// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Asahi Linux Drops MIT and Goes Full GPL After AI Tools Were Used to Steal Unreleased Code
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."
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.
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.
Asahi didn't name anyone so we are left with guesswork on who they are targeting with this license move.