Sun's FOSS VirtualBox hits the sweet spot for Linux (ITWire) [LWN.net]

Sun's FOSS VirtualBox hits the sweet spot for Linux (ITWire)

Posted Aug 14, 2008 3:18 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203)
In reply to: Sun's FOSS VirtualBox hits the sweet spot for Linux (ITWire) by cannedfish
Parent article: Sun's FOSS VirtualBox hits the sweet spot for Linux (ITWire)

> Second (this not VirtualBox's fault
> obviously) Fedora doesn't have a VirtualBox package

Well in a way it is.  They like to issue press releases that they are a GPL product.  Fedora
is smart enough to read the actual license terms and realize it ain't even close.  The Free
Software edition is basically the QEMU bits that were themselves GPL and the bits of
VirtualBox that are so entangled with QEMU that they really have no other choice than release
them as GPL.  All of the user friendly bits and neat features (USB) are only available in the
closed binary blob.

You can't even redistribute a package built from the GPL sources without either receiving
their permission (which can't be passed down) or changing the name from virtualbox.  Although
Fedora manages to live with compromising their principles with Firefox, VirtualBox isn't
important enough to do a trademark deal and flamewar over.

So it will probably be outside of Fedora forever... but will probably show up in freshrpms or
another 3rd party repo eventually.

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VirtualBox OSE is usable and available

Posted Aug 14, 2008 5:11 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

I'm not an Ubuntu user but I do believe that the Ubuntu folks have plopped a package for
VirtualBox OSE into one of their repos.  Don't ask me which one.

I installed it for my father-in-law who is using LinuxMint.  I installed it primarily so I
could create a Windows XP virtual machine since my father-in-law is a recovering Windows user.
:)  Although I didn't use it for an extended amount of time, I really didn't notice much
difference between the OSE edition and the commercial version... although yes, there are some
features that aren't there.

Your comment made it sound like the OSE edition was basically unusable and missing all useful
features.  That is certainly not the case.  Also, if I remember correctly the Ubuntu package
had "VirtualBox" as part of the name.  Have they made a special agreement with Sun?  I don't
know but I doubt it.

Sun's FOSS VirtualBox hits the sweet spot for Linux (ITWire)

Posted Aug 14, 2008 13:03 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

Although Fedora manages to live with compromising their principles with Firefox, VirtualBox isn't important enough to do a trademark deal and flamewar over.

Hmm - perhaps that's an indication that we need a distribution-agnostic WebKit-based browser for Linux sooner rather than later - it's the only reason I'm still using Firefox.