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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

They’re switching to GPL and you think that’s anti-open source? MIT has basically zero restrictions and assumes a good-faith collaboration environment. GPL is more realistic about the motives of much of the tech world, and in practice is much more encouraging of collaborative, open, and free software development. Kudos to them on making the switch.

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No, I am saying the maintainers are saying they're mad that people are using AI to extend Asahi, and in response they are switching to GPL.

Normally you do something in response that would solve your perceived problem. In this case, it seems to be a random unrelated action they've taken to the problem they identified.

I don't think they were "extending" Asahi, they were trying to hijack the project by making a new fork unrelated to their work, that's not the same, GPLv2 would force people to give attribution and not able to at least take the code without doing anything else for it, as you'd need to also have your own forks open source, that's more restrictive than MIT

Yes, but aside from the trademark issue (the fork cant call itself Asahi), GPL is 100% on board with letting you fork. It's on the tin, part of the freedoms it guarantees.

You are pattern matching on the "AI" part and reacting to it, but I think you should re-read the original post. The main thing seems to be some people taking this code and then reusing it without attribution (and, incidentally, trying to use AI to obfuscate this fact)

There never needed to be attribution according to their own license, which they picked without any outside influence. Where exactly is the issue?

I guess they picked a license that didn’t require attribution and then decided “actually this sucks” and are changing their judgement downstream of that

Sometimes some people change their mind.

Sure, they can change their mind. But it’s childish to call that “exploit[ing] our permissive licensing to hijack our work” or to call the people who took the license at it’s word “bad faith actors”.

Once you choose a license you just cannot get mad at people who read the license and then do what it says.

the term "bad faith actors" exists for cases where people use the text of the license rather than the spirit of the license. It's _for_ when people are doing things that one might describe as anti-social! Very subjective, of course.

The cynical argument is that the spirit of the MIT license was kicking in, but most people would prefer for the spirit of the MIT license to not be like the way it is.

Here I think the Asahi Linux team came to some realization of this variety and made a change. I don't think there's much to argue over here.

They didn't even name the people in the announcement! This is fairly muted when it comes to re-licensing announcements.

Perhaps childish is right, but... hey, they are within their rights to re-license.

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