Asahi Linux, the project to get Linux running on Apple Silicon Macs, has announced a significant change to its licensing approach. In its most recent progress report, they say they are moving from the permissive MIT license to GPL v2 or later.
The licensing decision comes after what the project describes as several attempts by third parties to take over their work, with the intention of replacing the project and then commercializing Linux on Apple Silicon. According to Asahi Linux, various third parties have attempted to do this.
In the most extreme cases, the team stated that code which was still in development was simply copied directly from the contributors’ personal repos and re-published without any attribution. In other cases, they’ve reportedly used large language models to rewrite the code and, in that way, mask the source.
Asahi Linux initially went with the MIT license in order to encourage collaboration with other open source operating systems (including the BSD projects). They now feel that the permissive licensing doesn’t offer adequate protection against the sorts of things they’ve come across.
The project has been compared to Wine, which moved from MIT to LGPL in 2002 in response to concerns about proprietary forks and fragmentation. Asahi Linux is hoping that its move to a stronger copyleft license will serve a similar purpose in ensuring that improvements made to the project are available to the wider open source community.
The transition is not yet complete. They’ve already started the process of relicensing all their repositories under GPLv2-or-later, and future Asahi Linux code will be released exclusively under strong copyleft.
On the technical side, the big change is the arrival of Apple M3 support, now generally available. Additionally, the devs have enabled DCP support on the M3 chips, which improves performance and battery life, enables sleep, and makes the display area around the notch usable on the supported MacBooks.
However, M3 graphics support requires additional work. The platform is pretty much feature parity with the M1 and M2 in all other respects; graphics acceleration is still very much in the works. The good news is that the reverse engineering team has managed to get the M3 GPU up and running and has rendered its very first triangle.
M4 Pro, M4 Max and M5 support have also moved forward in the preliminary stages. Initial DeviceTree support is now able to get these devices to a text console, though much more hardware enablement is still required before they can actually provide a full Linux desktop.
Another one is the introduction of initial Thunderbolt support. That’s already been incorporated into the Asahi Linux downstream kernel and is being pushed out to users. Currently, support is limited to USB3, XDomain, and Thunderbolt Networking. PCIe and DisplayPort tunneling are not yet supported.
Finally, the project is still working on getting its Apple audio and video decoder drivers ready for upstream submission. The Rust-based microphone beamformer has also become nearly twice as fast as it was previously through a series of SIMD optimizations.
For further technical details, see the Asahi Linux progress report.
