Comment by 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.).
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.