A decision at the end of a progress report
Asahi Linux is the community project porting Linux to Apple Silicon Macs. On November 7, project member James Calligeros published "Progress Report: Linux 7.3", whose closing section, "Learning from history", announces that the project has made "the difficult decision" to begin transitioning all of its repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later, and that going forward all of its code will be licensed under strong copyleft licences only.
Why MIT was chosen, and why it is being dropped
The report says that when the project started it licensed as much code as possible under the permissive MIT licence to make it easier for the BSDs and other free software operating systems to take part and reuse the work. But "some time ago", it says, the team was made aware of multiple attempts to exploit this to "hijack" its work, with a view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon; in some extreme cases, in-development feature code was lifted straight out of members' personal forks and published without attribution, or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obscure its origin. The report states that the MIT licence explicitly allows this and has no carveouts against bad-faith actors, and it attributes the return of such practices in part to frontier AI labs' appetite for high-quality training data.
The precedent cited, and the details left out
The report cites WINE as precedent: WINE was also originally released under the MIT licence and moved to the LGPL in 2002 to prevent further proprietary forks and encourage upstream contribution.
All of this is the project's own account. The report names no company or individual, offers no specific code comparison, and gives neither a timeline for the transition nor an explanation of how existing contributors' code will be relicensed.