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Comment by organsnyder

6 years ago

A former employer was threatened by Oracle because some downloads for the (only free for noncommercial use) VirtualBox Extension Pack came from an IP block owned by the organization. Home users are probably safe, but Oracle's harassment engine has incredible reach.

14 comments

organsnyder

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talideon  6 years ago

My employer straight up banned the use of VirtualBox entirely _just in case_. They'd rather pay for VMWare Fusion licenses than deal with any potential crap from Oracle.

  • umanwizard  6 years ago

    Anecdotal, but VirtualBox has always been a bit flaky for me.

    VMWare Fusion, on the other hand, powers the desktop environment I've used as a daily work machine for the last 6 months, and I've had absolutely zero problems other than trackpad scrolling getting emulated as mouse wheel events (making pixel-perfect scroll impossible).

    Despite that one annoyance, it's definitely worth paying for if you're using it for any serious or professional purpose.

    • vetinari  6 years ago

      On the other hand, VMWare Fusion kernel extension is the only culprit, why I've seen kernel panic on Mac.

  • pizza234  6 years ago

    This is throwing the baby along with the bathwater.

    VirtualBox itself is GPL. There is no lawsuit risk.

    What requires "commercial considerations" is the extension pack.

    The extension pack is required for:

    > USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices, VirtualBox RDP, disk encryption, NVMe and PXE boot for Intel cards

    If licensing needs to be considered (ie. in a corporate environment), but one doesn't need the functionalities above, then there's no issue.

    • talideon  6 years ago

      > This is throwing the baby along with the bathwater.

      It might be, but let's just say that Oracle aren't big fans of $WORK, and our founders are big fans of them. Thus our legal department are rather tetchy about anything that could give them even the slightest chance of doing anything.

      > What requires "commercial considerations" is the extension pack.

      And our legal department are nervous about that being installed, even by accident, so they prefer to minimise the possibility.

thu2111  6 years ago

Well ... that sounds initially unreasonable, but then if I think about it a bit more I'm not sure how you'd actually enforce a non-commercial use only license without some basic heuristic like "companies are commercial".

Is the expectation here that firms offering software under non-commercial-use-is-free licenses just run it entirely on the honour system? And isn't it true that many firms use unlicensed software, hence the need for audits?

  • smileybarry  6 years ago

    IIRC VirtualBox offers to download the Extension Pack without stating it's not free for commercial use. There isn't even a link to the EULA in the download dialog as far as I can tell (from Google Images, at least). Conversely, VirtualBox itself is free for commercial use. Feels more like a honeypot than license auditing.

    They can also apply stronger heuristics, like popping up a dialogue box if the computer is centrally-managed (e.g.: Mac MDM, Windows domain, Windows Pro/Enterprise, etc.).