Comment by aroman
10 hours ago
> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon.
Is this referring to Omarchy? Anyone have context? TBH I'm surprised their work was ever MIT-licensed instead of GPL.
The whole reason why people are trying to replace them is because they have stubbornly refused to use AI, which has directly impeded progress in getting M3/M4/M5/M6 working. It's fine of course for them to continue pursuing their hobby of doing everything manually, and honestly it is insanely impressive.
But most people just want stuff to work, so it's odd to complain about it when others do manage to get it to work using AI to build on top of their prior permissively-licensed work.
Wanting stuff to work is a valid reason to not use AI for more sophisticated development projects. Having a computer that kernel panics once every three days is useless to me, even if it works for you.
A kernel panic is the least of your worries with this hardware. Asahi had to introduce a custom daemon to avoid frying speakers. Apple doesn't need to care about making the hardware interfaces safe if they control the entire stack, so they don't, and expose dangerous capabilities to the OS.
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Linux kernel itself is AI development friendly.
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Its the monetizing part that makes me think its not Omarchy - they have no monetizing things.
They're referring to Omarchy, it's very clear on their IRC
I saw that's there is an Omarchy for Mac "team" consisting mostly of one guy who is active on Twitter (and quickly amassed many followers) and seems to have no prior experience of working on Linux kernel. They do not mention Asahi anywhere which isn't surprising to me given the reputation of DHH and Omarchy. This hijacking of open source by bad faith actors is very concerning.
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Omarchy has gotten somewhat of a reputation for getting a lot of sponsorship money from commercial actors. If by monetize you mean "Get people to pay us" omarchy are definitely monetizing. Not much different to Asahi themselves of course, but is it right/moral to fork another active projects code and use it in order to gain your own patrons? I don't hold the answers. But no they aren't selling anything.
edit: worth noting this example, where DigitalOcean started cutting OSS support only to pledge millions of dollars to Omarchy. No wonder people consider the project a leech to the OSS community, but also consider correlation != causation: https://itsfoss.com/news/digitalocean-open-source-credits-en...
DigitalOcean obviously cut their OSS support because they gave it as credits for a year and it required constant human review and interaction.
At the same time it was mostly to small OSS projects that dont have formal non-profits so no tax exemption benefits to DigitalOcean.
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They do have large entities donating to them
Is Omarchy trying to monetize Linux?
I mean, I get the poisoning the well of open source thing that some companies do. I didn't think Omarchy was trying to do that.
With how good LLMs are at reverse engineering, I've been looking forward to being able to ditch MacOS and still have decent hardware soonish.
Taking back the ownership of our devices to run our software is the positive future LLMs are giving us. We need only to take action.
The same LLMs you have to rent from the very richest people on earth? I would be careful to call that freedom
There's people running close to frontier model grade local AI on consumer and prosumer hardware, let's not act as if it was impossible to skip having to rent from OpenAI or Anthropic.
You know you can run LLMs on your own computer, right?
I don't get this complain. MIT does not forbid commercial use. So what's the fuss about?
From TFA:
> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.
It's one reason I've favored GPL of late, after many years using MIT. Not that many people these days would explicitly follow the terms of any license.
They are mad that vibecoders are building on top of their work, making real progress, then re-releasing it as "look it works" while containing a bunch of their work. Which is sort of fair but I don't get how that works in practice because in reality anyone can read the code which is open source and do whatever they want. Licensing won't stop them.
Sort of fair? Or actually fair because attribution for work is… fair?
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I really don't get why people even start with permissive licenses if they have people they don't like to use their software or if they're just going to go "not like that" at the first real use.
It seems like many times it's open source but "just to look".
They explain that they expected that MIT licensed code would encourage contributions from BSD OSes
I agree it was a poor choice of license and that GPL helps build a better community, I'm glad they mad ethe license choice
Because permissive licensing, and free software in general, rightfully comes with a certain cachet, and it turns out some people want the benefits of that reputation, but don’t actually believe in the freedom “to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose.” Hence the treadmill from permissive licensing to copyleft, and then later from copyleft to “source available”…
“But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.”
—Theo de Raadt (2001)
That'a weird how you placed copyleft next to source available side of spectrum.
That's opposite because copyleft is ultimately about user freedom not developers freedom.
GPL wont help Asahi team for a bit.
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