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Comment by chomp | Hacker News Reader

*VirtualBox considered harmful

Oracle recently started hunting our company for licenses due to the fact that the VB guest additions software phones home. Fail on us for not considering the license on the guest additions outside of the VirtualBox software.

Bye bye Vagrant! Time for a new workflow!

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Every now and then I think my company is paranoid for having a blanket policy of never using a single thing from Oracle (even to extent of rejecting anything using BerkeleyDB, and only using OpenJDK) then I see things like this and it makes sense.

I wonder when Oracle poisoned this well (Fortune 100).

Ive been recommending that same thing for a while. Microsoft, too, if you can get away with it. It's why I won't build stuff on .NET and Java. They were already big on patent suits, BS licensing, and Business Software Alliance looking for snitches. Then, Oracle went for API's are under copyright ruling. Then, I definitely wasn't gonna touch Oracle software.

I mentioned Sun and Jonathan Schwartz as an example in the essay. The entire debt-based economy is fundamentally flawed.

Apparently they track it by downloads. My previous employer (a 25k employee healthcare system) had IP addresses in their logs a dozen times. Rather than telling Oracle to go f&*$ themselves (or at least pointing out that the organization has guest networks used by thousands of people), they rolled over and paid the $40,000 invoice—and threatened to take away the ability for their in-house software developers to download their own software.

Are you sure you mean "Guest additions". Guest additions is GPL licensed however the "VirtualBox Extension Pack" requires a paid for license to use commercially. And since Oracle make it very clear what licenses are needed [1] they are well within their rights to hunt down your company for revenue which is due.

[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ

By the way, this is a relatively recent change made in July 2017 (License version 10). Before that there was no "noncommercial" restriction, and the free license allowed commercial use as long as you installed it yourself (i.e. not deployed company-wide etc.).

Old FAQ, license, and a relevant FAQ excerpt:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161108235524/https://www.virtu...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170126144347/https://www.virtu...

> Personal use is when you install the product on one or more PCs yourself and you make use of it (or even your friend, sister and grandmother). It doesn't matter whether you just use it for fun or run your multi-million euro business with it. Also, if you install it on your work PC at some large company, this is still personal use. However, if you are an administrator and want to deploy it to the 500 desktops in your company, this would no longer qualify as personal use.

Current license with the "noncommercial" requirement: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox_PUEL

Wow that FAQ and license is confusing. They define personal use as:

> use solely by the person downloading the Product from Oracle on a single Host Computer, provided that no more than one client or remote computer is connected to that Host Computer and that client or remote computer is used solely to remotely view the Guest Computers.

This isn't a standard definition for "Personal Use" and I can now understand why people weren't happy.

I think it’s a pretty normal definition of Personal Use, that was necessarily screwed up by the fact that many tenants of a system can use a hypervisor installed on one machine. So, even if you’ve installed that software for personal use, you can’t be letting all your friends in the office SSH in and use it under your same license.

Nice. We're currently using the free VMware player for educational purposes (non-profit) and got a call from some VMware sales rep recently. Which is funny because some years ago we tried to get a statement from them about our kind of usage and after bouncing around nobody could give us a definitive answer.

However, our guy handling the call just mentioned that we're considering switching to VirtualBox anyways, and didn't hear back since. I think VBox actually has a clause about educational use in their EULA.

FYI from the VMware Workstation Player FAQ <https://www.vmware.com/products/player/faqs.html> they state:

> VMware Workstation Player is free for personal non-commercial use (business and non profit use is considered commercial use). If you would like to learn about virtual machines or use them at home you are welcome to use VMware Workstation Player for free. Students and faculty of accredited educational institutions can use VMware Workstation Player for free if they are members of the VMware Academic Program <http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1033638>.

I guess while we are on the topic of licenses; how crazy is it requiring users to obtain their own Oracle JDBC driver in 2018? Why won't Oracle just let us distribute software ready to connect to their database?!

You mean virtualbox extension pack, right? As far as I'm aware, guest additions don't require a paid license.

Why would you throw away Vagrant together with VirtualBox?!

You can also use vagrant with a libvirt/KVM backend (on linux). Sometimes the box is not available in libvirt format. But that issue can be worked around converting them

If they're using MacOS, I'm not aware of any other free providers for Vagrant. Though admittedly, it's been quite a while since I've used Vagrant.

VMWare Fusion however works like a charm, and while it costs a little money you get a lot more bang for your buck.

VirtualBox on MacOS is absolutely shit.

Even Debian Stable (9.x, at this point) can install kvm and virt-manager and just run at this point. I have one VB installation that came in under the license smackdown a couple of year ago that I need to migrate. There is no point in using virtualization software the current owners don't want you to run.

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