Asahi Linux Drops MIT, Goes Full GPL After AI Used to Steal Unreleased Code
itsfoss.com
itsfoss.com
Note, I am not saying clones are good. Time goes on and something gives the feeling of "this was totally ai site" although sometimes it is hard to say what exactly but sometimes, the speed of animation, the kind of bugs and small behaviour quirks.
And the hardware the drivers are for is Apple's, not Asahi's, to begin with.
It doesn’t help the “yes it is; the LLM learned from reading that code, but didn’t copy it” camp that there have been cases where an LLM output blocks of code that are very similar to parts of GPL-licensed source code.
Question for copyright to apply then is whether those blocks are copyrightable and if so, whether the ‘copied’ text is similar enough to the source text.
Even if that model has been trained on that copy left code.
> Even if that model has been trained on that copy left code
How can an LLM be trained on code that it doesn’t have access to?
> cloning it is reverse engineering according to the courts.
What courts? Has there been any court case on this w.r.t. LLMs?
AFAIK, learning from copyrighted material is fine, copying copyrighted material (with some exceptions) isn’t. Where one ends and the other starts is a gray area, but at the far end of that scale lies learning by head and then reproducing verbatim. That definitely is copyright infringement.
Also, claiming “clean lab” isn’t worth much. Question is whether that holds up in court.
I would guess/hope/think one need not go as far as Phoenix technologies went to make a BIOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design), but I can see why they did things that way to be on the safe side.
AIUI this includes Linus Torvalds, and would have affected Linux. Which, by the way, is heavily written by LLM these days, including by Linus himself using Anthropic's tools.
An LLM reading some code and learning from it (at any point in time, in training or as used through agentic programming tools) is in this regard no different from an human being doing the same thing.
Nothing stops me from reading Asahi's source code and then writing my own from what I learned. My agent can do the same thing faster and better. It would also be less likely to resemble Asahi's, as an LLM has seen and learned from a far larger body of code than I have in my entire 30+ years of programming.
If anything, code is becoming no longer a product but a commodity, which brings us closer to the sort of freedom GNU and the FSF aimed for; Something to celebrate.
No, there's no way the genie is going back into the bottle. The past is not coming back. Reality is best accepted and worked with, not fought.
This has always been true, but recreating has become easier through agentic programming tools, upsetting the balance.
"makes recreating instead look more attractive"
They're already recreating and they have zero intention of sharing.
Use the correct source instead: https://asahilinux.org/2026/11/progress-report-7-3/
They also require using the official source for submissions. [0]
>> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.
I also think it's interesting that beamforming is a thing that exists on such a generic device as a laptop. Is that how the mic tries to pick up only things in front of the laptop? Must be!
Um, no... MIT requires that the license text be included. That's attribution, because you normally put your name or the name of your organization in there. You can't just take MIT code and have AI rewrite it without attribution, at least, you need to do some kind of air gap or something, and lawyers might poke holes in that too. I'm sure people are doing it though. But GPL won't save you from that.
But I do understand why they want to move to GPL, to block out scammers who want to make closed-source forks and charge money for them.
"for(int j=0; j<ARRAY_SIZE(a); j++) total += a[j];" - you could copy paste this and more out of leaked Windows source code and it still wouldn't be a copyright violation. But beware that a sum of a large number of trivialities can be not trivial.
All completely unsettled law at this point. And, as a general guiding principle, you do NOT want to be one of the people who pays millions in legal fees and court costs to find out, whether you are right or wrong.
If I were you, I would not copy even truly "trivial" amounts of code.
Here's my thing: Oracle v Google was a fight that ended up being about two specific things, one was whether API-declaring interface code could be a subject of copyright law. Once it was found that interfaces could be copyrighted the lawsuit turned its focus to thing two: whether Google's use was fair use.
The part of copyright law, as written, that protects your ability to copy a 9-line RangeCheck function, is NOT, emphatically NOT fair use. It is convergence, the least-known of all the copyright principles.
Convergence says that if many people not coordinating could be expected to all land on the same results, then logically the activity must not be creative expression and the result must not be possible to copyright. This is why nobody owns math equations like e=mc^2. It's not that no creativity was required to derive the equation, it's that anyone working at it would end up with a result of that form.
In programming this would protect you when you do something like write a parser for a programming language, or implement a common helper function. Anything where you may, through now fault of your own, do work that creates a result similar to work that someone else has already done.
I don't know that any significant court case has ever even had arguments based on convergence even though it's the most practical shield most of us have most of the time.
I've yet to see evidence that this is real.
Either way, I don't presume any good faith actor will have an issue with the GPL license. Just seems like pointless posturing. The usual Linux drama.