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Comment by aroman | Hacker News Reader

Is this referring to Omarchy? Anyone have context? TBH I'm surprised their work was ever MIT-licensed instead of GPL.

The whole reason why people are trying to replace them is because they have stubbornly refused to use AI, which has directly impeded progress in getting M3/M4/M5/M6 working. It's fine of course for them to continue pursuing their hobby of doing everything manually, and honestly it is insanely impressive.

But most people just want stuff to work, so it's odd to complain about it when others do manage to get it to work using AI to build on top of their prior permissively-licensed work.

Wanting stuff to work is a valid reason to not use AI for more sophisticated development projects. Having a computer that kernel panics once every three days is useless to me, even if it works for you.

Linux kernel itself is AI development friendly.

Some of us think that is a mistake.

Hmm very vague. "Some of us".

Do the massive amount of vulnerabilities not make you think twice?

At this point, I trust human code less than llm code. Design and architecture of the code still greatly benefit from a good human touch, but I'm not sure how long that will remain true.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenAI-948-Linux-LPE-Bugs

So validate with an llm and humans. People committing code they haven't read - which will inevitability happen - is dangerous and hard to remotely verify.

Some people will always disagree with something. That's what's great about free software. There will probably be some Luddite anti AI Linux fork at some point.

That's not what they meant. It's AI friendly, not slop-friendly.

There's a reason no Omarchy patch of any kind has made it to the kernel list yet. I did personally look into some of their code and it is certified, hacked-togeter slop.

How do you define the difference between ai friendly and ai slop?

experience

My definition, FWIW.

AI-friendly: you can use the LLMs however you wish, but you must thoroughly understand every part of submitted code.

Slop-friendly: understanding anything is optional.

I'm pretty sure Asahi devs experiment with LLM tools, but not to Omarchy's extent. LLM ban is purely a filtration filter, so that they wouldn't be spending time overbearingly exhausting number of patches generated with AI, and not someone who cares about this than a shiny tool.

Everyone understands that LLM is a mean to an end, but it's clear that Omarchy got two confused and it's showing.

A kernel panic is the least of your worries with this hardware. Asahi had to introduce a custom daemon to avoid frying speakers. Apple doesn't need to care about making the hardware interfaces safe if they control the entire stack, so they don't, and expose dangerous capabilities to the OS.

There was a fun period of time where Boot Camp still existed, but Windows could fry the speakers because it didn't have any of macOS's thermal protection. I think this was after the 2016 redesigns, as I had a mid-2015 with no such issue.

Its the monetizing part that makes me think its not Omarchy - they have no monetizing things.

They're referring to Omarchy, it's very clear on their IRC

I saw that's there is an Omarchy for Mac "team" consisting mostly of one guy who is active on Twitter (and quickly amassed many followers) and seems to have no prior experience of working on Linux kernel. They do not mention Asahi anywhere which isn't surprising to me given the reputation of DHH and Omarchy. This hijacking of open source by bad faith actors is very concerning.

Yeah, on their GitHub for example, in their m1n1 fork they tend to refer to "upstream" as... the main branch of their fork.

Very interesting choice of words, but again, all their work including all issues and docs are LLM-generated.

Nonsense.

> Omarchy on... > Apple M1/M2 chips# > Asahi Alarm is a version of Arch for Apple M1/M2 computers built on top of Asahi Linux. You can get Omarchy running on top of that with some effort. See the user-driven guide.

Source: https://omarchy.org/manual/omarchy-on/

> [...] You finished what Asahi started, and you’re already pushing on to M4, M5, and M6. Thank you!

Source: https://omarchy.org/news/2026/11/marcelo-alcantara-and-birk-...

They do have large entities donating to them

Omarchy has gotten somewhat of a reputation for getting a lot of sponsorship money from commercial actors. If by monetize you mean "Get people to pay us" omarchy are definitely monetizing. Not much different to Asahi themselves of course, but is it right/moral to fork another active projects code and use it in order to gain your own patrons? I don't hold the answers. But no they aren't selling anything.

edit: worth noting this example, where DigitalOcean started cutting OSS support only to pledge millions of dollars to Omarchy. No wonder people consider the project a leech to the OSS community, but also consider correlation != causation: https://itsfoss.com/news/digitalocean-open-source-credits-en...

DigitalOcean obviously cut their OSS support because they gave it as credits for a year and it required constant human review and interaction.

At the same time it was mostly to small OSS projects that dont have formal non-profits so no tax exemption benefits to DigitalOcean.

It is worth noting the same article's discussion of nodejs reads as "DO shut down a program, possibly planning a v2 of said program, but failed to communicate it to its dependents and didn't realize until they started planning to leave". Or they were just fighting the fires caused by a github issue named "Transition off of Digital Ocean" caused \o/

Is Omarchy trying to monetize Linux?

I mean, I get the poisoning the well of open source thing that some companies do. I didn't think Omarchy was trying to do that.

With how good LLMs are at reverse engineering, I've been looking forward to being able to ditch MacOS and still have decent hardware soonish.

Taking back the ownership of our devices to run our software is the positive future LLMs are giving us. We need only to take action.

The same LLMs you have to rent from the very richest people on earth? I would be careful to call that freedom

You know you can run LLMs on your own computer, right?

There's people running close to frontier model grade local AI on consumer and prosumer hardware, let's not act as if it was impossible to skip having to rent from OpenAI or Anthropic.

I don't get this complain. MIT does not forbid commercial use. So what's the fuss about?

From TFA:

> 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.

It's one reason I've favored GPL of late, after many years using MIT. Not that many people these days would explicitly follow the terms of any license.

They are mad that vibecoders are building on top of their work, making real progress, then re-releasing it as "look it works" while containing a bunch of their work. Which is sort of fair but I don't get how that works in practice because in reality anyone can read the code which is open source and do whatever they want. Licensing won't stop them.

Sort of fair? Or actually fair because attribution for work is… fair?

Your credit is your first commit. After that people copy/paste patches back and forth as they will. It happened before AI. I've run patches in prod that were basically someone's random RAID controller patch posted to the Gentoo forum. If it works, it works.

I really don't get why people even start with permissive licenses if they have people they don't like to use their software or if they're just going to go "not like that" at the first real use.

It seems like many times it's open source but "just to look".

Because permissive licensing, and free software in general, rightfully comes with a certain cachet, and it turns out some people want the benefits of that reputation, but don’t actually believe in the freedom “to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose.” Hence the treadmill from permissive licensing to copyleft, and then later from copyleft to “source available”…

“But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.”

—Theo de Raadt (2001)

That'a weird how you placed copyleft next to source available side of spectrum.

That's opposite because copyleft is ultimately about user freedom not developers freedom.

GPL wont help Asahi team for a bit.

> That's opposite because copyleft is ultimately about user freedom not developers freedom.

Yeah, the whole idea of GPL is to restrict developers from doing certain things, because it would be harmful to users

They explain that they expected that MIT licensed code would encourage contributions from BSD OSes

I agree it was a poor choice of license and that GPL helps build a better community, I'm glad they mad ethe license choice

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