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Comment by thex86 | Hacker News Reader

VirtualBox is one of those projects that is a very important part of my daily use. But somehow I feel that it doesn't get much love from the open source community. Is it just me?

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VirtualBox has a quality problem: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317

This has gotten a lot better, but for quite a while `vbox` was the thing that made my computer lock up most of the time, especially the USB drivers.

I've always found performance and stability to be quite lacking with vbox. Parallels and VMWare are both mature, performant, frequently updated, and well-supported, so I see little reason not to use one of those, especially given that I'm using it for work and don't want to wait on a VM for no good reason.

On the other hand, Parallels and VMWare frequently charge for their updates. I rarely find software that has such short license spans. I bought Fusion 5.0.3 in June and they already want to charge me for Fusion 6 (btw. the only version that officially supports Mavericks). Fusion 5 is now dead in the water.

This is okay for me on a single machine, but at scale of a development team, it gets expensive quick.

I installed 4.3 today on my iMac, the machine crashed twice within a couple of hours, it has never crashed otherwise in 2+ years I have owned the machine. Uninstalled, will upgrade Parallels if necessary.

When I was hired at my current company everyone used Virtualbox for their Linux test environments. Unfortunately, part of my job was building/rebuilding custom ISOs, which required long days of tweak->rebuild ISO->rebuild VM.

After I changed from job-installed Virtualbox to the Parallels license I already had, my workflow sped up dramatically. It was easily half the time to go through an install cycle as before. The performance increase was absolutely massive. Since then we've only had more and more issues with Virtualbox that makes it worth replacing at a relatively high cost.

I've tried contributing to it, but several factors makes it really hard.

They includes:

  - Poor documentation
  - Broken build scripts for some of the open source version
  - Lack of support on forum/IRC
  - Project still uses SVN
  - Procedure for submitting patch is very archaic

I personally would love to see them move to Github. It would make contributing much easier.

Isn't the choice of a version control systema a too low barrier to prevent anyone from contributing? I'd think that actual technical skills required in the VM domain area plus language skills would be a much greater barrier to entry, isn't so? Do we need everything to be so perfect?

I don't know the full story, but from what I've heard, it probably involves things like 1) Oracle owns it 2) It requires a non-free compiler to build the BIOS

1) It's GPL'd so nothing is stopping you or anyone else from forking it away from Oracle. 2) The Open Watcom compiler is not required to build VirtualBox at all. The actual compiler is free for anyone to download and use.[1]

Other people here raised some legitimate points with the build and patch submission process that I also would like to see improved, but yours are just narrow minded prejudice.

[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12011

VirtualBox is only partially open source and free:

For example, USB2.0 and RDP support is non-free.

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ

Also note that they do openly admit that stopping to release under GPL 2.0 is not planned, but possible and they reserve the right to do so in future.

Please tell this to the Debian team (that they're narrow minded and prejudice) because I'd like them to move VB off of contrib (non free) to their free repos.

The Linux community are focused on KVM, which is already in-tree and carried by most distributions.

I understand that this leaves Mac users behind. But OS X isn't open source, so there we are.

Vbox's "api" is kind of an abomination. Vagrant succeeds because it parses sometimes non-machine friendly command line executable output.

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