Asahi Linux drops MIT for GPL after code was lifted from private forks

Asahi Linux drops MIT for GPL after code was lifted from private forks

7 November 2026: Asahi Linux, the project that brings Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, has begun moving all of its repositories from the permissive MIT licence to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. "Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only," James Calligeros wrote in the project's Linux 7.3 progress report.

Not yet independently verified. Asahi has not said when the transition will finish, how code already contributed under MIT will be relicensed, or which projects it has in mind. Its own report is the only primary source. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

What the project says happened

The report describes multiple attempts to use the permissive licensing to hijack the project's work, "with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon". In the most extreme cases, it says, feature code still in development was taken from developers' personal forks and published without attribution, or rewritten with LLM assistance to hide where it came from.

"The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors," the report says. It also blames demand for high-quality training data from frontier AI labs. No company or project is named.

An old precedent from WINE

Asahi chose MIT at the start so that the BSDs and other free operating systems could reuse its work. It compares its position to WINE, the Windows compatibility layer, which was MIT-licensed until proprietary forks led its developers to relicense under the LGPL in 2002. That move was meant to stop further proprietary forks and encourage contributions back to the original project.

Asahi calls its own decision difficult. The wording is that it will "begin the process" of transition, and the report gives no finishing date.

Who has to check their dependencies

The practical effect falls on anyone building on Asahi code. A product or distribution that ships Asahi components under MIT terms should identify which repositories it draws on, and which commit it pinned, before taking later updates. Code taken under the GPL brings source-sharing obligations on distribution that MIT did not. BSD projects, which Asahi originally wanted to help, face the same question.

It's FOSS points out that the report does not say how existing contributions will be relicensed or whether every past contributor has agreed. Each repository's licence file is the record to watch, since the announcement gives no dates. Asahi offers no evidence of the LLM rewriting in the report.

Related tools

Asahi Linux itself has no listing with us.

Sources

• Asahi Linux: Progress Report, Linux 7.3, 7 November 2026
• It's FOSS: Asahi Linux drops MIT for GPL, 8 November 2026