[olug] VirtualBox?

[Luke -Jr]

On Tuesday 01 April 2008, Adam Lassek wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 11:33 AM, Luke -Jr <luke at dashjr.org> wrote:
> > On Tuesday 04 March 2008, Brady Cox wrote:
> > > Anyone had any experience with this?  I'm installing Windows right
> > > now.  Wish me luck.
> > VirtualBox is anti-free software. (k)qemu works great and is free!
> 
> This is not true. Virtualbox OSE is GPL2 licensed. Qemu can't hold a candle
> to VB -- especially seamless mode.

VirtualBox "OSE" is just a legal form of artificial restrictions. VirtualBox, 
complete, is not GPL2. The company also acts to prevent* any kind of 
developer community from growing outside of their employment, so they can 
effectively close even the GPL2 code at any time without much risk of a fork.

Basically, that GPL2 "edition" serves the purpose of killing off competition 
from free software like qemu.

As far as a technical comparison between qemu and VirtualBox... qemu supports 
x86, ARM, SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS, and m68k-- including running an x86 system on 
PowerPC or almost any other combination. qemu also supports user-mode 
emulation, meaning you can run just one application instead of booting an 
entire OS. VirtualBox has USB support too, but it is one of the features that 
is kept out of the GPL2 edition.

On the other hand, VirtualBox does have "seamless" Windows support and a nice 
GUI. I don't use Windows, nor care overly much about GUIs, so qemu is an 
obvious win to me. Maybe those things are more important for you. But in the 
long run, I think it'd be far easier to add "seamless" + GUI to qemu that it 
would be to rewrite VirtualBox's architecture to support the things qemu 
does.

Luke

* No, I don't have actual proof they are actively trying to do this. However, 
I have heard from developers that in effect this is the case. Also note the 
list of external contributors has a total of ONE person:
	http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/List%20of%20Contributors