The developers of the project Asahi Linux, which is engaged in porting Linux to Mac computers with ARM Apple Silicon chips, announced the transition from using a permissive license MIT copyleft license GPLv2+. The decision was made due to attempts to appropriate their labor for personal gain. Some unscrupulous manufacturers abuse the rights granted by the MIT license and borrow Asahi’s work to displace the original project and aggressively monetize Linux on systems with Apple Silicon chips.
In some cases, the creators of commercial clones copied still raw code from personal forks of Asahi developers, work on which was not completed, and also published derivative works without attribution or rewriting the code using AI tools to hide borrowing code from another project. The MIT license allows such manipulations and does not protect against the appropriation of other people’s work.
Initially, the Asahi project chose the MIT license to support and attract participation from developers from BSD systems and other free operating systems, but in modern realities the project turned out to be defenseless from unfair use. It is noteworthy that in 2002, the Wine project faced a similar situation, which was forced to change its license from MIT to LGPL to counter the emergence of proprietary forks, protect the ecosystem from fragmentation and encourage the transfer of changes to the main project.
In addition to the announcement of the license change, the Asahi Linux project reported on the work done over the past few months. Among the achievements:
- The macaudio (sound subsystem) and avd (Apple Video Decoder) drivers were transferred to the main kernel, the implementation patches for which include approximately 3100 and 13000 lines of code. Added basic DeviceTree descriptions for M4 Pro, M4 Max and M5 devices. Whenever possible, Asahi developers have begun using an upstream-first strategy, in which changes are initially developed in the main kernel. This strategy was applied to the development of TI USB-PD, SPMI and Thunderbolt drivers.
- Support for M3 chips has been stabilized and removed from the experimental design tag. Compared to the previous report, support for the display processor (DCP) has been implemented, thanks to which it was possible to increase performance, extend battery life, implement a transition to sleep mode, and add the ability to use the area around the “notch” with a camera on MacBook screens.
- Resolved the problem with reverse engineering of M5 chips, which began to use mini-applications in isolated enclaves controlled by the microkernel Secure Kerneland used for tasks such as indicating when a camera is turned on. We managed to simultaneously launch three virtual machines under the control of the bootloader m1n1