Comment by apatheticonion

I'd imagine it's for IP protection.

There's a lot of documentation required to write drivers for hardware; for the GPU, they'd need to share the instruction set of the GPU along with the specifications of the controller. Lots of weird things like power management too.

If shared, that's probably enough to create copycat hardware or at least an emulator.

Personally, I just want to run Linux on my latest MacBook Pro on day 1 with full hardware acceleration. If it was supported, MacOS would be on the device for as long as it took to install Linux.

I think the only way that would happen is if the EU extended "the right to repair" to include software, compelling companies to release documentation sufficient to produce drivers with. I'm sure Apple would maliciously comply, like provide the ISA but not power management specs - but that would still cut the work required by the Asahi team by 80%.