Virtualbox Goes OSS

paltemalte writes to tell us that VirtualBox has gone open source. InnoTek released their virtualization product as open source and launched virtualbox.org to help cultivate the community and allow further development of the software.

Freeware?

[JoshJ]

This is taking "freeware" to another level- Free/Opensource the low-quality version, while requiring people to pay for the "professional" version?

The following list shows the features that are unique to the closed-source edition of VirtualBox. Note that this list may change over time as previously closed source features are made available for the open source version as well.

* Remote Display Protocol (RDP) Server

This component implements a complete RDP server on top of the virtual hardware and allows users to connect to a virtual machine remotely using any RDP compatible client.

* USB support

VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and supports passing through USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 devices to virtual machines.

* USB over RDP

This is a combination of the RDP server and USB support allowing users to make USB devices available to virtual machines running remotely.

* Shared Folders

With the use of Shared Folders, users can share directories on their host system with guest systems.

* iSCSI initiator

VirtualBox contains a builtin iSCSI initiator making it possible to use iSCSI targets as virtual disks without the guest requiring support for iSCSI.

Someone needs to explain bittorrent to them

[symbolset]

From their download page:

* Note: Even though we provide BitTorrents to allow for easier downloads, we do not currently permit redistribution of the VirtualBox binaries above. See the Licensing FAQ for details. This restriction does not, of course, apply to the Open Source Edition (OSE) below.

Obviously the don't quite get how bittorrent works.

Re:Can Linux Virtualization Get Any More Fragmente

[QuantumG]

Competition is great. I love competition. But there's this other thing, called co-operation, and us folks in the open source world, we're supposed to be better at co-operation than we are at competition. If just a few of these groups would work together (instead of just pinching stuff from qemu, as most of them do) the technology would be a whole lot better.