While I'm glad to see Oracle are pushing the development of VirtualBox, I'm fearful they will make it 'not-free' and try to price it like VMware Workstation. I have the same fear for MYSQL. Let's hope Oracle have the sense not to tinker too much.
It would be unfortunate if they decided to start charging for the free edition, however most of the product is GPLed. The only parts which are not open source are a machine-level RDP server, USB support, and USB over RDP (see http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions). I'm sure the community would fork it if Oracle closed it up.
Comments
While I'm glad to see Oracle are pushing the development of VirtualBox, I'm fearful they will make it 'not-free' and try to price it like VMware Workstation. I have the same fear for MYSQL. Let's hope Oracle have the sense not to tinker too much.
It would be unfortunate if they decided to start charging for the free edition, however most of the product is GPLed. The only parts which are not open source are a machine-level RDP server, USB support, and USB over RDP (see http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions). I'm sure the community would fork it if Oracle closed it up.
They could always do a Wine thing or just have a commercial(ly supported) version.