News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on IBM CTO Sees Smaller Container Platforms Ahead. Parent comment

Re:IBM CTO Sees Smaller Container Platforms Ahead by lima on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @08:27AM (#21920840)
> You link your application directly to Linux and get a vmlinuz binary

How does this work with proprietary applications and the kernel's GPL license?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:IBM CTO Sees Smaller Container Platforms Ahead by ksec on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @09:01AM (#21921016)
I assume all these Unikernels Are targeting the Cloud and Server Usage? Which is perfectly fine for GPL.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:IBM CTO Sees Smaller Container Platforms Ahead by rwmj on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @08:37AM (#21920896)
"Consult a lawyer" would be the best answer I could give here. The applications we're actually targeting are open source servers of various kinds (think memcached, apache, etc.) so it's not an issue we need to consider ourselves as the licenses will be compatible.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:IBM CTO Sees Smaller Container Platforms Ahead by justincormack on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @08:53AM (#21920976)
No one really knows if the Linux "userspace is not covered by GPL" applies if you link an application to the kernel. Or if you then apply link time optimisation.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:IBM CTO Sees Smaller Container Platforms Ahead by pnako on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @08:28AM (#21920846)
In the cloud no one can hear you violate the GPL.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:IBM CTO Sees Smaller Container Platforms Ahead by fourthark on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @09:59AM (#21921367)
This is why AGPL exists. I think it is agreed that deploying your app to the cloud is not distribution and doesn’t run foul of plain GPL.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:IBM CTO Sees Smaller Container Platforms Ahead by wongarsu on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @10:01AM (#21921373)
In the cloud you usually don't distribute binaries, so you don't have to distribute sources either.
[ Parent | on HN ]