[olug] VirtualBox?

[Adam Lassek]

I think you're misunderstanding what copyright means in relation to Free
Software. All GPL code is copyrighted by whoever wrote the software. This
can get a little complicated if there are a lot of authors, but under US law
any code you write is automatically copyrighted. What the GPL does is
provide an agreement to not exercise those rights as long as certain
conditions are met. That's why it's possible to violate the GPL in the first
place -- the rights to the code still exist and will default back to
copyright infringement if the terms of the license are not upheld.

The fact that Innotek (now Sun) owns the copyright on (some of) the code for
VirtualBox does not mean it isn't Free Software.

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 9:15 PM, Luke -Jr <luke at dashjr.org> wrote:

> On Wednesday 02 April 2008, Scott Jones wrote:
> > On Wednesday 02 April 2008, Luke -Jr wrote:
> > > On Wednesday 02 April 2008, Rob Townley wrote:
> > > > If VirtualBox is hard to fork, i would guess only because
> impediments
> > > > and lack of docs have been put up to make it hard.
> > >
> > > I think one primary factor is the company's (lack of) cooperation with
> > > outside developers, preventing a developer community. A fork would
> bypass
> > > this problem, but for the fork to take place in the first place, there
> > > needs to be a community of developers prepared to maintain it.
> >
> > Why fork when license-compatible changes could be merged back into
> qemu's
> > tree where possible?  At its core, VirtualBox *is* qemu.
>
> Really? First time I've heard anything of this sort.
>
> Last time I checked, Innotek claims complete copyright over VirtualBox, so
> if
> this is true, they are infringing. Being GPL-2, even if they have put
> proper
> attribution in the fine print or something, they would still be in
> violation
> for the non-GPL versions.
>
> Quite curious would also be that USB support is a non-GPL feature of
> VirtualBox, but supported by qemu.
>
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