Comment by 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?
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.).
Wait is this the pack that gets screen resizing and copy/paste working?
You're thinking of the Guest Additions which is part of the base Virtualbox package and free for commercial use.
The (commercially licensed) Extensions pack provide "Support for USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices, VirtualBox RDP, disk encryption, NVMe and PXE boot for Intel cards"[1] and some other functionality e.g. webcam passthrough [2]. There may be additional functionality enabled by the Extension pack I cannot find at a glance, but those are the main things.
[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads [2] https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing
A tad offtopic, but on my 2017 Macbook Pro the "pack" was called VMWare Fusion.
With my MBP as host and Ubuntu as guest, I found that VirtualBox (with and without guest extensions installed) had a lot of graphical performance issues that Fusion did not.
They harass universities about it too. Which is ludicrous, because universities often have residence halls, and people who live there often download VirtualBox extensions.
Their PUEL license even has a grant specifically for educational use.
It does, but it's not 100% clear if administrative employees of universities count as educational. Sure, if you are teaching a class with it, go for it; but running a VM in it for the university accounting office is not as clear.
Education might not be the same as research in this license's terms. And there are even software vendors picking nits about writing a thesis being either research or education, depending on their mood and purse fill level...