Microsoft Quietly Released Its Own Linux Distro

tomshardware.com

36 points·MR4D··6 comments

A Look into CBL-Mariner, Microsoft’s Internal Linux Distribution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27792366 - July 2021 (118 comments)

FTA: “Microsoft has developed its own Linux distro, CBL-Mariner, and released it under the open source MIT License.”

The GitHub repo (https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner) confirms that license. Linux is GPL2 licensed, so that can’t be included. Is this more a distro builder than a distro, with the builder being MIT licensed?

Yes, Kind of. I think calling it MIT overall would be a little misleading, If you look closely Microsoft has clearly mentioned what part of the code is released under what license, like for example looking at linux-firmware specification [1]. Added commits to Linux are under GPLv2 (as they have to be), The build script itself is under MIT, while added drivers and under their own respective licenses. Same is true for all bundled packages. List here [2].

So it's more of a Licensed under MIT unless otherwise stated.

[1]. https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner/blob/1.0/SPECS/linu...

[2]. https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner/blob/1.0/SPECS/LICE...

Link to the Github repo is here: https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner

Makes me wonder when/if we will see WoL (Windows on Linux).

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