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FYI: Linux is licensed under GPL v2. AWS uses Linux extensively.


Amazon has a legion of lawyers and probably quite a few technically apt ones that are actually comfortable diving into questions around whether a chef/ansible/whatever script to provision a linux box will go against GPL - and additionally whether pre-baked containers qualify or if a service to dynamically build pre-baked containers would qualify...

These are, honestly, expensive questions to answer as the tech gets more complicated - at what point is linux part of the binary you're distributing vs. an external dependency and, if you get the answers wrong, you'll potentially create an outage that will wreck havoc on the economy by grinding the cloud to a halt and cost Amazon tens of billions in revenue.

This is a very, very, complicated situation.


suyash is basically correct; usage of GPL (any version) licensed software is very heavily scrutinized at Amazon. Explicit exceptions need to be filed for, and are rarely granted. Unless you can make a very strong business case for the software, you're not going to get it approved.




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