> I appreciate all of the hard work that's gone into Asahi linux

Actually no, you don't seem to. Regardless of the license, remind yourself that they didn't lose ownership of what they did. They can still be disgusted at how people are building lazy derivatives just because they wanted to share what they did with a different kind of developers. I know I would.

Frankly, I'm not sure if permissive licenses have a future. No one wants dev marketeer to save tokens reusing their work.

The former and latter are nearly equivalent to both licenses AND everyone can still make cheap distributions with a different name slapped on top.

They only chose GPL because Omarchy is MIT and they _hate_ Omarchy.

> Frankly, I'm not sure if permissive licenses have a future. No one wants dev marketeer to save tokens reusing their work.

On the contrary, the AI shift means that devs who are concerned about enforcing the purity of their community and stymieing marketeers will be vastly outnumbered by people who just want to “move fast and fix things” (which is essentially what Omarchy represents)

Could be, reading what their fanboys write on X they could have more than a few reasons. In addition to details I'm not aware of related to how the fork has been developed.

> and stymieing marketeers will be vastly outnumbered by people who just want to “move fast and fix things”

These can be easily conflated in a single category of people, I don't see why the first group should not be able to keep prompting a model for days or months.

If you're disgusted at the prospect of people you don't like using and extending your code, then open source is not for you.

Regardless, I think you're also confused.

"How it is being used ... to build cheap distributions on it slapping a different name on front"

I'm sorry but this is literally exactly the thing GPL is designed to allow. I don't understand why this is so confusing.

Copyleft is designed to prevent people from improving on the code and then keeping their changes secret and closed source. That's not what Omarchy or anyone else is doing, they're all already sharing their changes.

Let's walk through it from the Asahi linux perspective so we're all on the same page:

- Asahi makes software licensed MIT

- Omarchy takes that software, slops the AI-iest slop on top.

- Omarchy releases the source code of those changes to Omarchy's users.

- Asahi is mad because they hate AI, but they have no recourse unless Omarchy violates their trademark.

Now compare how it works under GPL:

- Asahi makes software licensed GPL

- Omarchy takes that software, slops the AI-iest slop on top.

- Omarchy releases the source code of those changes to Omarchy's users.

- Asahi is mad because they hate AI, but they have no recourse unless Omarchy violates their trademark.

The right way to handle this would have been for Omarchy to give something back in another form (monetary probably) since Asahi doesn't want their Gen-AI code. Why? Because that's what a good neighbor does with upstream and because frankly I expect they will need more of the Asahi code in the future (if they don't decide to just ask Claude to get it, as Asahi seem to imply they already did). It seems to me that their shitty "community" is just insulting the Asahi people forgetting that without them they wouldn't be running Linux on their Macs.

The only thing that the move to GPL does is forcing them to adopt a compatible license if they need to take more code in the future, but considering the Omarchy is a distribution with no commercial/closed-source aspirations. Should have been GPL since the beginning.

I’m jumping in here but I really don’t understand this perspective. The license doesn’t say that downstream must be a good neighbor. In fact it explicitly avoids any restrictions on how downstream code is used. If you’re not happy with that then the GPL is not the right license. Holding others up to an unwritten standard (which is inherently not enforceable) is a recipe for disappointment.

True, but like in a working society, many things are being done even if not explicitly requested by some regulation because it's obvious that they help improving the society for everyone. For me it's pretty automatic, I have money for or coming in thanks to my project? The first thing I will do is giving back to the dependencies that made my project possible, I don't even need to think about it too hard.

And let me add also this, upstream decided that for whatever reason they don't want code generated by AI? It's their project, they are free to decide to follow this route, who cares. Pretty pathetic to whine about it on X, though.

You know how some countries have high-trust societies even without specific norms and others definitely don't? Same thing. Opensource needs high-trust and a community that punish some undesirable behaviors and who doesn't follow unwritten, but obvious, rules.

> so Asahi loses the ability to forbid downstream users from using AI to modify the source code.

Did anyone suggest they want to do this? It's in their own Asahi that they don't want AI.

It’s because they are not stating what is their true motivation.

What you are seeing is not primarily open source enthusiasts advocating licenses based on merit.

You’re seeing open-source being used as a store-front for leftist politics - and their primary issue is that Omarchy, AI and DHH is not on “their” side politically.

And thus they want to restrict open-source and lock it down so that (more) politically neutral or AI-friendly projects can’t use their code.

Hope this helps.

Omarchy devs with LLM support have implemented this functionality not available on Asahi:

- TouchID

- M3 GPU

- DisplayPort over USB-C

- demoed DisplayPort over Thunderbolt (WIP)

- deep sleep (0.05W discharge)

- MacBook Neo support

- demoed M4 Pro/mini support (WIP)

If that's slop, then please, sir, I'd like some more slop.

It's ok, here, read the speakers section: https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/

And also, I see many people forgetting that someone has been accused of taking code from unreleased branches for new features and adding it to the rest as its own.

I'm definitely not anti-genAI since that allows me to focus only on the less boring things but man, some people sound like they never wrote a line of code in their life, zero respect for years of work of someone else.

I guess you're talking about me

> sound like they never wrote a line of code in their life

I see. Well, I have, quite a few.

> zero respect for years of work of someone else

Unclear how "respect" is supposed to manifest in this case. Not contributing to open source? Not forking or extending open source?

> They could have tried building that form scratch... and instead... I wonder why.

They could have started from zero, reading the Apple specs and probing the hardware to discover how it works, rather than extending existing code? Why would anyone do that? Surely the goal is to ship software, not chase purity.

> Not contributing to open source? Not forking or extending open source?

What? Are you really asking? You keep ignoring that Asahi pointed out some dishonest behavior like integrating parts of code from unreleased branches and so on.

> They could have started from zero, reading the Apple specs and probing the hardware to discover how it works, rather than extending existing code? Why would anyone do that? Surely the goal is to ship software, not chase purity.

There are no apple specs. The hypothetic "could" means nothing.

> "Why would anyone do that?"

They wouldn't. Because they are not capable of doing it.

> Surely the goal is to ship software, not chase purity.

Ok, so they take what they want and are free to criticize those who gifted them the source like idiots. No decency.

The concept above was quite simple: You take code from someone? In addition to following the license also show some appreciations for those that saved you months if not years of development and bug fixing.

> they are not capable of doing it.

So someone who leverages tools is incapable of doing something? To make a good meal, I must raise my own cows instead of going to the butcher.

Anyway, if you do not like AI. That is fine. But do not tell the rest of the world how they are allowed to use it. Some of the most talented people use and leverage AI to increase their velocity. Does that make it slop? What a silly view of the world.

Also stop bringing nationalities and politics into things. It's moronic and makes you look like an idiot.

Brought what? What does that even mean? Don't daydream on what others think kid and try to come up with better opinions. This whole exchange was a complete waste of time, and the silly stuff you just attempted to write is just the cherry on top.

Imagine trying to explain that you should respect the upstream code YOU TOOK FOR FREE to a guy that I hope was playing dumb.

What a time to be alive, full blown idiocracy, even worse than the movie. I hope that AI (that I don't use as a meat proxy) will help me reduce this kind of interactions.

You, go out an play with the other morons.

You just wrote word slop. It's ironic you want AI to help reduce these kind of interactions, because so do I. It'll help you understand what is going on, or at least help you write your thoughts so you can actually articulate them well.

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.

Sometimes some people change their mind.

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

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.

I’m not saying that the GPL is a bad choice, or that they shouldn’t switch. I actually prefer for software to use the GPL over the MIT license!

But it is wrong to complain when someone sees your license and takes advantage of it. The whole point of a copyleft license is to give people extra advantages for using your software, so calling anyone who relies on those advantages a “bad faith actor” is pretty outrageous. In fact I think it is Asahi Linux who are acting in bad faith now.

However, I think, what they want is for people to stop making those shoddy additions altogether. And open source does not solve that problem because that's exactly what open source exists to allow.