Karanbir Singh wrote:
We develop and sell a server based application as an appliance in which, in general, the customer does not have direct access to the operating system. My question is, are we allowed to use CentOS as the underlying operating system and if so what licence considerations are there or what licence information would we need to include for our customers?
CentOS as a distribution is shipped under the GPL license.
Which means you need to either give source or a written offer to supply it on demand for 3 years.
So your app would need to comply with and be compatible with the GPL license and all the issues that come with that.
Programs that are 'aggregated' by inclusion on the same media aren't necessarily affected by the OS license. The GPL requirements are only inherited if your application is derived from a GPL work, as for example, by including libraries covered by the GPL (and most, but not all have the more liberal LGPL, so you have to check this carefully whether you supply the OS or not).