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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit confused on the licensing here. CoreOS says it's Apache 2.0 licensed. But it also says its Linux. If it includes the Linux kernel, as it appears to, then those bits is licensed under the GPL and can not be re-licensed as Apache 2.0. So, it's a bit disingenuous to claim the whole package is Apache 2.0, since it isn't.

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How relevant is the issue in practice though? It doesn't seem too likely that people are going to want to provide commercial forks of the whole project including the inux kernel. And it's pretty likely they could package their changes to the CoreOS code together with a stock kernel.

The claim on the site is that "Code produced by the CoreOS team is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. " - Which seems reasonable enough.

relevant for everybody who cares... if you run a business based on this software you care and should care.

Where is the text you find confusing? What I found about licensing says "Code produced by the CoreOS team is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license." That's extremely clear about what the license applies to.

http://coreos.com/products/

Yes, for people who understand licensing stuff. For the many people who don't, they could say that 3rd party components of CoreOS are under various open source licenses, but the code they produce is Apache 2.0.

From the home page:

"CoreOS is a new Linux distribution that ..."

"CoreOS is Apache 2.0 licensed and ..."

It's like Android. Everything that wasn't already GPL and is produced by the project is released with an Apache license. Everything that is GPL is still GPL.

If you fork it, you still have to keep releasing the source for the kernel, and possibly part of the user land, but the rest of the user land is fair game.

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