Great observation, two things:
- During my time at Apple I never saw any of the macOS source code, at all, even for userspace components. I had not even heard of things like SPTM.
- I have not worked there since June 2025
I don't believe that there's any risk due to my former Apple employment. As another example, WINE does not ban all former Microsoft employees, they just ban anyone who has ever looked at the Windows source code. If I felt there was even a chance that my employment at Apple may have exposed me to relevant internal secrets, I would refrain from contributing to community projects.
> As another example, WINE does not ban all former Microsoft employees, they just ban anyone who has ever looked at the Windows source code.
It's an interesting example given that Wine considers deriving code from traces of original components (like hypervisor traces) tainted and also bans LLM contributions for legal considerations: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...
Great job for bringing up new apple's silicon chip , m4 a18 to linux . I hope the project keep alive and maintained , and if you can't mainline it , remmber many other project do out-of-tree version well maintained [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] .
[1]: https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux Rust for Linux
[2]: https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common/ Android OS linux kernel
[3]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs OpenZFS kernel module
[4]: https://github.com/awemorris/linux-pc98 Linux pc98 / 32 bit x86
[5]: https://github.com/OpenDingux/linux Linux on retro gaming device
[6]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux Linux on older apple silicon M1/M2/M3 chip
[7]: https://github.com/microsoft/wsl2-linux-kernel Linux on Windows
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
All of this was public knowledge, and there is nothing damning about knowing someone who worked on something.
And if I'm connected on Linkedin with half of silicon valley, and know a lot of people from different companies I not allowed to contribute anywhere?
Have you consulted this with a lawyer, or is it what you simply think/believe.
I guess it's none of our business.