> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.

> As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

I appreciate all of the hard work that's gone into Asahi linux, but this statement is basically nonsensical. Making the license copyleft does not prevent people from monetizing it, using AI to develop on it, improve it or wreck it. All it does is make sure that anyone who does will share their source code modifications.

It doesn't sound like they want their code to be open source. It sounds like they want it to be closed source or at least restrictively licensed enough that they can tell users of the source how they're allowed to interact with it and modify it.

The entire point of open source / free software is that it lets you do what you want with it. The original author doesn't need to accept your AI patches or write AI code themselves, but downstream users are not restricted.

I am just baffled by how confused even very smart people seem to be about how open source and permissive licenses work and what they are for.

(Now, should they use trademark law to ensure others can't use the name Asahi Linux confusingly? Absolutely. But that's got nothing to do with copyright.)