CentOS 7 License???

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Today I did a yum upgrade to my kvm‘ized CentOS 7 test machine
(perhaps a bad day to do such a thing) and received new kernel vmlinuz-3.10.0-229.1.2.el7.x86_64, among many other things. When I rebooted, I was asked to confirm (or renew, or some such)
my license. My LICENSE ???

I was booting in text mode and the actions required were a) unfamiliar, and b) hard to understand.

As I recall, I had to read the EULA – a worrisomely Microsoftian demand – and accept it. Of course, the terms were pretty benign. Then I had to continue. I can’t remember the exact language. Of course, now when I reboot, all this cruft is gone.

Is this a cute April Fool joke?
If not, WTF is going on?

8 thoughts on - CentOS 7 License???

  • hmm, I wasn’t even watching the console of a C7 VM running under esxi, it rebooted in about 10 seconds to 7.1, no such EULA afaik.

  • I thought that was something you only see on the first console login after the install – but it shouldn’t repeat after an update. Most of our systems are installed remotely by someone else and managed over ssh after that – so no one is ever going to be at a console to see it.

  • RHEL 7, which is upstream of CentOS 7, has a license component. I
    suspect that given CentOS’s goal of replicating RHEL “warts and all”, this is a by-product of that. When I played with CentOS 7 GUI install, the “license” is basically “it is GPL, have a nice day” [ Accept ].

  • This is normal for the first boot after installation, but it shouldn’t have done this after an update. It didn’t do that here after the update; it did do that on the firstboot after install. Unlike many others here, CentOS 7 is my primary, every day, work and personal desktop OS of choice, and so it’s just one of those normal ‘first time through’ things after install.

    The LICENSE in question is the GPL, as I recall.

  • I generally do minimal installs and I don’t recall ever seeing any first boot license prompt. is this a ‘feature’ only if you’ve installed the desktop GUI ?

  • Could be; all of the many installs of C7 I’ve done thus far have needed the GUI for one reason or another. I do remember when installing RHEL
    6.1 a few years back and selecting ‘Server with a GUI’ (or similar) that the firstboot license prompt came up in text mode, but none of the C6
    installs I’ve done in text mode have gone through the firstboot
    ‘license’ agreement (or make a normal user, or any of the other things firstboot can do, like network configuration in text mode for a NetworkManager-controlled NIC) thing.

  • This is indeed the case, RHEL 7.1 requires one to accept the license on initial boot up.

    The package that drives that was firstboot but is no initial-setup. In our 7.1503 testing, CLI based installs did not require accepting our EULA, but GUI based installs do require accepting the EULA before continuing.

    But in any event, both licenses and EULAs are very important. In the case of CentOS 7 Linux, this is the EULA:

    ==================================================

    CentOS-7 EULA

    CentOS-7 comes with no guarantees or warranties of any sorts, either written or implied.

    The Distribution is released as GPLv2. Individual packages in the distribution come with their own licenses.

    ==================================================

    As you can see, the overall License of CentOS is GPLv2 and individual packages have individual licenses.

    But make no mistake, the fact that CentOS Linux uses open source licenses is very important. Without those licenses and adherence to them, CentOS Linux could not exist.

  • Let me dig into some details :

    When a new install is run, anaconda leaves behind content that allows the following reboot process to run through some tasks before control is handed back to the user – eg. setting up selinux / kdump / users and also redoing some previously done tasks. again eg. when the storage backend changes or a new layer is introduced.

    one of these tasks is to pass through the EULA, implicitly saying you are ok with it. the CentOS Linux EULA has always been a case of ‘no gurantee, no warranty, the sla is that there is no sla’. But I am sure you are aware of that, since you already had a CentOS install to start with.

    For this release, we’ve disabled some of the tasks that get run – but retained the code that runs these tasks, since its actually required to be run in some cases ( eg. with firstboot –reconfig is called ).

    The option I had was to either strip out the eula process, or do something more drastic : like not have it run at all, unless a user asked for it to be run. And in that case, force it to always run in LANG=C ( there are some incomple translations in the mix as well ).

    I took the second option – and disabled this code completely by default, unless its implicitly asked for – in some cases, this can be down to system changes ( the only one i was able to find was when the backing storage changes in a virtualised environ – but mostly large public clouds, i wonder what your storage format is that caused this ).

    the text UI isnt easy to work through, I totally agree.

    In the coming days, I will try and strip out the EULA acceptance bits from the code and request Johnny to issue an update for this.