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> Virtualbox itself has been somewhat closed down / restricted over the course of Oracle's tenure. How so? VirtualBox was GPL-licensed before the acquisition a

by yrro 3y ago

> Virtualbox itself has been somewhat closed down / restricted over the course of Oracle's tenure. How so? VirtualBox was GPL-licensed before the acquisition and it remains so today. The extensions pack was always under a proprietary license.

omnibrain 3y ago
> The extensions pack was always under a proprietary license. Yes, while I'm not sure if the actual terms of the license changed, enforcement changed very much. With SUN ist was "Of course, you can personally install it on your work computer and use it for work. Only if you deploy it to your fleet of computers please pay us." https://web.archive.org/web/20100204053823/https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ https://web.archive.org/web/20100204053823/https://www.virtu...
- nvm0n1 3y ago
  Maybe that approach to licensing is why Sun ran out of money and had to sell itself?
  - thrawaway3292 3y ago
    I doubt VirtualBox was even a line item on Sun's financials, so I really doubt that had anything to do with their failure.
    - nvm0n1 3y ago
      What I meant is, a lackadaisical approach to billing and asking for money was common at Sun for everything software related, same thing for Java which was definitely a line item.
      - dredmorbius 3y ago
        Hardware was Sun's revenue model. Cost of revenue for penny-ante fluff would have been orders of magnitude greater than actual revenue. Goodwill and other benefits substantively greater. Blaming Sun's demise on Virtualbox largess is ludicrous on its face.
  - jzb 3y ago
    Sun has its lunch eaten by Linux and commodity hardware. Selling proprietary UNIX and super expensive hardware was a great business until Linux and (comparatively) cheap Intel boxes were good enough for more and more customers.
lyu07282 3y ago
For example they removed PCI pass-through, they never updated their GPU guest drivers to support modern OpenGL, they never improved their (experimental) support for Mac OS X guests, in general the development of VirtualBox has been pretty much been completely halted over the last decade, in comparison to VMWare they practically went backwards.
- lucb1e 3y ago
  > in comparison to VMWare they practically went backwards. Well that's interesting. I recently went from free virtualbox to a paid vmware workstation license because of some frustrations with vbox, and found that vmware is not better or worse but just frustrating in different ways (e.g. clipboard sync doesn't have a directional option and shared folders are harder to set up, but usb passthrough is much more stable). Performance is identical for various workloads as near as I can tell, except that vmware's VM displays freeze for 0.5 seconds every time you focus/unfocus one (virtualbox is seamless). If vmware went forwards compared to that, one would have to have been crazy to pay if you can just apt install virtualbox

by yrro 3y ago

omnibrain 3y ago

> The extensions pack was always under a proprietary license. Yes, while I'm not sure if the actual terms of the license changed, enforcement changed very much. With SUN ist was "Of course, you can personally install it on your work computer and use it for work. Only if you deploy it to your fleet of computers please pay us." https://web.archive.org/web/20100204053823/https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ https://web.archive.org/web/20100204053823/https://www.virtu...

nvm0n1 3y ago
Maybe that approach to licensing is why Sun ran out of money and had to sell itself?
- thrawaway3292 3y ago
  I doubt VirtualBox was even a line item on Sun's financials, so I really doubt that had anything to do with their failure.
  - nvm0n1 3y ago
    What I meant is, a lackadaisical approach to billing and asking for money was common at Sun for everything software related, same thing for Java which was definitely a line item.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      Hardware was Sun's revenue model. Cost of revenue for penny-ante fluff would have been orders of magnitude greater than actual revenue. Goodwill and other benefits substantively greater. Blaming Sun's demise on Virtualbox largess is ludicrous on its face.
- jzb 3y ago
  Sun has its lunch eaten by Linux and commodity hardware. Selling proprietary UNIX and super expensive hardware was a great business until Linux and (comparatively) cheap Intel boxes were good enough for more and more customers.

lyu07282 3y ago

For example they removed PCI pass-through, they never updated their GPU guest drivers to support modern OpenGL, they never improved their (experimental) support for Mac OS X guests, in general the development of VirtualBox has been pretty much been completely halted over the last decade, in comparison to VMWare they practically went backwards.

lucb1e 3y ago
> in comparison to VMWare they practically went backwards. Well that's interesting. I recently went from free virtualbox to a paid vmware workstation license because of some frustrations with vbox, and found that vmware is not better or worse but just frustrating in different ways (e.g. clipboard sync doesn't have a directional option and shared folders are harder to set up, but usb passthrough is much more stable). Performance is identical for various workloads as near as I can tell, except that vmware's VM displays freeze for 0.5 seconds every time you focus/unfocus one (virtualbox is seamless). If vmware went forwards compared to that, one would have to have been crazy to pay if you can just apt install virtualbox