A partner program is a contract, not a logo. kcore's terms are short on purpose. They are not a pitch.
The tiers
- Referral: 10%.
- Reseller: 25–30% margin, with deal registration.
- MSP / CSP: monthly per socket, a minimum commit, and white-label of the official bits only.
- OEM: per-unit royalty.
White-label means redistributing official signed builds under the partner contract. It does not mean compiling a fork and calling it kcore. You may say “based on kcore Community Edition” or “compatible with kcore CE APIs” when that is accurate. You may not name a product or distro “kcore”, or “kcore Standard”, “Premium”, or “Enterprise”, and you may not imply official support, without a written partner agreement.
What you are allowed to ship
Official builds are the ones published by the kcorehypervisor GitHub organisation on GitHub Releases and through the enterprise update channel. A rebuilt ISO is not an official build. Partners redistribute official artifacts only under the partner contract. Community Edition stays Apache-2.0 for evaluation and contributors. The subscription pays for the signed distribution and the support tier, per physical CPU socket, not per core.
Why this matters for an MSP
Your customer is buying an operating model they can hand to an auditor: the bits match the vendor's bits, the name on the contract matches the trademark, and the per-socket count is the same number on every node. A fork with a new splash screen fails that test the first time someone asks who patches it.
Write to the address on the partners page if the tier matches the motion you already have. Do not start by rebuilding the ISO.
Questions: team@tacconiconsulting.com.