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