Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by qwertox | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

qwertox·

But it's pretty hard not to use the Extension Pack.

View on HN

I don't think I've ever needed an extension pack feature.

You used to very much need it as it improved performance, display resolution and I/O significantly.

Oracle could not milk VirtualBox for money so they used this as a way to extort unknowing commercial users.

How is it hard? It is a separate download and install.

Sure, but it's reasonable for most people to expect an extension they've downloaded from within the app itself might have similar licensing as the app itself.

Even if it isn't reasonable to do so, I suspect most people do indeed do so, and that's exactly what Oracle is counting on.

> from within the app itself

Where in the App does it download the extensions? I know it will download the Guest Additions for you, but those are something completely different.

How? It doesn't add any functionality relevant to most users and you have to download it separately from Virtual Box itself.

It was required (at least used to) to use USB2.0/3.0, RDP compatibility, PCIe passthrough. I remember having to download that, so my guess is either I'm not typical user, or there are two different worlds with respect to how VBox is used.

1: https://docs.oracle.com/en/virtualization/virtualbox/6.0/use...

I think it's extremely uncommon for most people to need either rdp or PCIe passthrough, and I'd guess it's still quite uncommon (though more likely than the previous two) to need usb passthrough.

I have been using Virtual Box for years without needing any of those.

When it finally came down to PCIe pass through to get better 3D support I moved to qemu/kvm, no one forced me to pirate Oracles software for that. Of course qemu/kvm can be an absolute shit show to configure, so I still default to Virtual Box.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com