Asahi Linux is moving to GPL version 2 or later, and DHH says it changes nothing for Omarchy
Asahi says its permissive licensing was exploited to hijack its work and is dropping MIT for strong copyleft. DHH’s answer on X: the kernel was already GPL, and Omarchy itself is MIT.
Image: Asahi Linux (asahilinux.org)
Asahi Linux is leaving the MIT license behind. In the Linux 7.3 progress report, published on November 7, 2026, James Calligeros writes that the project “made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.” The report gives no timeline for that process, but the direction is firm: “Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only.”
Calligeros says the project was “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.” He adds: “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 report doesn’t say who it means, and Omarchy is never mentioned.
The section is called “Learning from history,” and the history is WINE, which Calligeros notes started out under the MIT license. “In 2002, WINE was relicenced under the LGPL to prevent further proprietary forks from being created, and to encourage direct upstream contribution,” he writes.
DHH answered on X on November 8, 2026: “Asahi changing to GPLv2 changes nothing, btw. The Linux kernel is already GPLv2! We make all the source changes we have against the Linux kernel available, as we do with anything based on Asahi. Omarchy itself is MIT, the most permissible license. Enjoy!” The license file in Omarchy’s repository does carry the MIT terms. “GPLv2” is DHH’s shorthand; Asahi’s report says version 2 or later.
Two minutes earlier, quote-posting Peter Steinberger, DHH had raised a different complaint: “I’m grateful for the work Asahi did on Apple Silicon, and in the best open source spirit, we’ve been expanding that with TouchID, M3 GPU, DisplayPort over USB-C, deep sleep, MacBook Neo. But thanks to agent acceleration, Asahi rejects upstreaming 🤷” That is DHH’s characterization. The progress report doesn’t address outside contributions to Asahi, and its own upstreaming section is about Asahi’s patches going into the mainline kernel. Steinberger had argued on X that “Adding new restrictions that make it harder for other projects to build on that is not the way. And that AI rejection is just silly.”
The AI part comes from Asahi’s generative AI policy, which DHH also quoted on X later that day: “LLMs engender harms to the pillars of Asahi Linux: software freedom, the open-source community, the open Internet, the environment, digital privacy, user consent, and software developers themselves… we broadly forbid the use of generative AI.” He signed off with an eye-roll emoji. His excerpt skips the legal argument in between. The policy says Asahi relies on clean room reverse engineering and that “these systems are likely to violate the clean room requirements and taint the resulting code.” It also goes on past where DHH stops: “Due to these legal and ethical issues, we broadly forbid the use of generative AI tooling for material contributions to Asahi Linux.”
The link to Omarchy comes from observers, not from Asahi. “At least I think Omarchy probably was a big reason why Asahi did it. And they are free to do it. I just wish they would have found a different solution here that does not require the GPL :(” Armin Ronacher wrote on X on November 8. It’s FOSS pushed back at the reaction the same day: “I don’t understand why Omarchy crowd is upset and angry with Asahi Linux opting for GPL instead of MIT license. How does it impact Omarchy negatively?”
Joshua Warren, whose M1 Max kernel fix we covered this month, answered the claim directly, though the report doesn’t name him either. “Everything I do is open source, released directly on GitHub with an MIT license. There’s no secret plot to replace Asahi and then charge for it (that’s what they claimed is happening in their announcement),” he wrote on X on November 8. He also said his work is now based on Aurora, not Asahi: “Aurora forked from Asahi long ago. Everything I work on is new code – that’s how we got M3, M4, M5, M6 and Neo support which Asahi still doesn’t have.” On M3, the same report says support “is now generally available without the EXPERT flag” and calls the GPU “the very obvious exception” to feature parity with M1 and M2.
