> concealing that he is a former Apple engineer with direct contacts to the people involved in Apple Silicon development
This is false. I am a former Apple engineer. I did not conceal it (it's the top item of my resume and my LinkedIn and I made my PR from my public Github with my name attached, as opposed to a pseudonym which is expressly allowed by Asahi policy). I also had no exposure, at all, to any internal information or code about macOS, SPTM, or Apple Silicon during my time there.
I also don't have connections to people involved in Apple Silicon development (and I'd add that this does not mean someone cannot contribute, the question is were they exposed to tainted information, which is absolutely not true in my case). I have many friends who work for Apple (I'm a Stanford alum) but none in Apple Silicon directly.
I disagree with the phrasing of this entire thing, but this statement is demonstrably false.
Ah, don't worry about those guys. This is very cool! I love the technical write up -- so interesting: )
At least according to your own accounts on the Asahi IRC rooms, you were very aware of SPTM (which is part of the AS platform) and knew the people working on it: https://oftc.catirclogs.org/asahi-dev/2026-06-04#35383763
The friend I am referring to I met at Stanford around April of 2026 in a dorm event. We've spoken in person exactly once (I use "friend" loosely to describe anyone I've spoken to who I'm not on bad terms with) and at no point did we discuss anything detailed about Apple Silicon. For further context, I left Apple in June of 2025.
Isn't that chat log from 2024?
If you read the page it says 2026-06-04.
Ah. I read the post, but only saw "2024-07-16 04:52 ChanServ changed [...]"
On mobile I didn't see the full URL, and zoomed before I saw the calendar. My bad.
am i crazy or is the date stamp not literally in the link?
Spend enough time in tech and you'll know lots of people who know both technical and business secrets and are under various levels of NDAs. The message you link to explicitly mentions only public info was exchanged. Just talking to someone is not an indication of infringement in any way.
I think this comment is missing the forest for the trees. Obviously, ephemeral interaction is going to happen.
The author’s blogpost is sloppy and has some signs of being AI written. This kind of bleeds into the main point I’m going to make.
Asahi Linux folks are clearly more conservative and erring on the side of caution, so, this means that the glibness with which the author is treating any of this is probably sufficient cause to refuse his entries. It is unclear if LLMs should be considered a toxic waste dump in terms of trying to maintain a clean room. We have not established a standard. It is clear the author doesn’t think this is a big deal, so that’s one conflict. The other conflict is that it is not clear what their exact interactions with Apple Silicon folks is and their glibness of it doesn’t clarify anything.
If you take a group that is trying to be very careful about the potential legal landmines a still nascent technology has and you get someone that espouses a general glibness about those concerns wanting to merge code…why on earth would you expect that group to accept them as a contributor?
This is not to say this isn’t really cool and a neat use of LLMs, but it is totally understandable why Asahi Linux won’t accept the fruits of this kind of development. If it turns out that Apple can identify its non-OSS code in this, it’ll be a mess.
> Asahi Linux folks are clearly more conservative and erring on the side of caution
I mean they are working around and on hardware controlled by a nearly 5 trillion market cap behemoth who has resources on the level of some nation states.
I'd be erring on the side of caution as well if they could hire that many lawyers.
> <StanfordAppliedCyber[m]> one of my friends is a very senior engineer who lead a lot of the sptm work and controls a lot of boot, may talk to him about it (obviously he hasn't told me anything that isn't public)
For the lazy.
You are accusing someone by twisting their own words about their own self disclosed identity against them from a throwaway account created 5 hours ago.
And they say irony is dead.
I say this from an anonymous account but at least it isn't a throwaway. And at least I have the good taste to feel a little shame for my hypocrisy.
Do you work for Apple?
Probably not. Clean room RE is serious business, projects like Dolphin have to carefully vet contributors to remain legal.
Everyone says this, and then exactly zero cases are cited in support of or against this creative legal theory known as "clean room RE."
No statute defines "clean room RE" and there's basically no relevant litigation establishing case law.
When you say "case" does that mean you're rejecting the evidence of Phoenix technologies not getting sued along with all the other BIOS clones?
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. "Not getting sued" doesn't validate a legal theory - legal theories are validated in court where they become case law. Until then, they are plainly speculative.
This "clean room RE" fabrication is also not something so obviously compelling that nobody would ever attempt to challenge it - it's just that nobody has cared to put dollars behind it. IP provenance cases are enormously difficult to prove and are almost always settled ahead of trial. This concept is software engineer folklore more than anything.
Saying you won't believe it's effective at all until someone sues and loses isn't the most compelling argument. If nobody sues then yes that is some evidence of effectiveness. It's not an absence of evidence, you're misusing that line.
But there are plenty of successful projects which would probably have been taken down if it wasn't for clean room RE. I mean just look at the clean room IBM BIOS clones from "IBM compatibles" in the early days of the personal computer.
This is the same logic that the TSA uses to justify its existence. "We're so good nobody attempts it!"
The background level of software copyright legal actions is significant enough. If plane attacks happened that much then it would give us solid evidence of TSA effectiveness even if they never caught anyone directly.
there isn't ?? I sorta thought we figured all this out decades ago when SMB and DeCSS were being reversed? I think dosemu or something as well ?
I seem to recall DeCSS being the 'hot button' as it was RE'd in a 'non clean' way, the code released, and then a 'clean room' RE could be made from the 'public' info ??
edit: actually, at the time I think there was German law allowing RE for 'interoperablity' or some such. But that was a long time ago so my memory might be off.
Who volunteers to be the shmuck that fights Nintendo's lawyers in court? Who's funding the defense against Apple?
It's safest to err on the side of plausible deniability, any proximity to OEM software increases liability if things go wrong.
Nintendo doesn't care. There's been proprietary Nintendo SDK code in libogc (open source library for making GameCube homebrew) for years. And more recently the various decompilation process have made recreations of linked code from the SDK that compile match byte for byte. In practice the legal risk of being sued into oblivion for this is not there. If anything there would be a DMCA takedown / cease and desist.
Right, but they are one of the biggest DMCA abusers. They killed many fan projects. They killed game renting in Japan as a concept. They killed Yuzu (a Switch emulator). And they could change their mind at any time.
>They killed Yuzu (a Switch emulator).
For the record Yuzu included code for circumventing Nintendo's DRM they had on game carts. It violated the DMCA.
Would you consider taking all of your learnings and translate them into a concrete specification and publish it on your website, so that we can all do our own clean-room from-spec-only implementation?
Everything that you say can be true, and yet Asahi project may want to avoid needing to prove what you say in a courtroom.
"We don't want to take on the risk of working with a former Apple employee, who could potentially leak trade secrets and expose us to unwanted liability" is a very different statement than asserting that they were banned for deception. The post you're replying to is responding to accusations against their character and behaviour. Clearing those up is an entirely different matter than saying anything about whether former employees should be allowed to contribute to the project.
FFS Linux kernel have tons of patches with "Asahi Lina" specified as "author" even though commiters are real people:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
Just call yourself "Idea Llmina" or whatever and let someone else commit it.
I'm sure Omarchy will appreciate the effort, even if you're snubbed by Asahi -- being able to run Linux flawlessly on Apple Silicon is going to be awesome.
I wouldn't expect "flawless" support for those chips in the next decade, even with AI. The earliest-supported Asahi chips still have missing power management and dark silicon.
The only way to get flawless Linux support is to buy hardware from an OEM that supports Linux well.