• Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    What ever you happens, do not use this for commercial purposes. Virtual box is free and libre but the guest addons are not. They will find and bill you for every single person in your company. Not per active user but per employee. This has cost companies millions

    Under Linux you can just use KVM. Gnome boxes or virtual manager should work fine.

    • Laurel Raven@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      And they DO NOT CARE if you don’t actually use or install the extensions (unless something has changed, the guest add-ons are part of the free open source part, it’s the extensions for things like USB 2 support that aren’t free for commercial)

      You can use it freely, by license, but they’ll come after you anyway

      I’m still pissed that they bought Sun, so many great products now controlled by those assholes… Virtual box, MySQL, Solaris, Java…

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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        2 months ago

        I’ve just seen quite a few posts about companies getting audited by Oracle over Virtual box and Java

      • LeFantome@programming.dev
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        2 months ago

        The only license that VirtualBox and the Guest Additions are even released under is GPL3. I do not even see a dual license.

        What remedy are they proposing when they come after you? I am not sure I would even take their call or respond to their letter. If I did, I would just send them the GPL text, announce that we are complying, and tell them to pound sand.

        I suppose it might be fun to tell them that I got it via IBM or Red Hat or something and to take it up with them. But I probably would not actually be dishonest about. As above, if I got a letter asking me to pay for their GPL software, I would just mutter “idiots” and throw it away. If they want to persist, it would only cost them money and I would continue to respond the same way.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      I use the version of VirtualBox that has been modified to use KVM as the back-end. Do you know if it has the same problems?