dear vbox developers and users, i would like to get the proprietary parts, especially the VirtualBox Extension Pack, open source. most of VirtualBox is already open source, which is a good thing in several regards: - quality of distro integration and - debugging
getting basic OSE virtualbox support is straight forward and better than any other solution i tried (i'm on linux, i tried vmware/libvirt) for desktop virtualization. in contrast to OSE virtualbox, installing VBox extension pack is a PITA: - http://nixos.org/wiki/Installing_VirtualBox_on_NixOS - http://forums-web2.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-717099-start-0.html - http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/VirtualBox/Installation#Extension-Pack it usually forces me to manually download the extension pack which interrupts my whole upgrade process. and i have to do that on each upgrade of my system which really costs a lot of time. so here is my proposal: we try to get the 'USB 2.0 support codebase' of the 'VirtualBox Extension Pack' open source! VirtualBox Extension Pack consists of: * support for USB 2.0 devices * VirtualBox RDP and PXE boot for Intel cards * VirtualBox Remote Desktop Protocol (VRDP) support * Experimental support for PCI passthrough on Linux hosts i would like to start with the USB 2.0 support becoming open source and i think we have several options: == 1 == oracle releases the 'oracle USB 2.0 codebase' as GPL for free - is that an option? == 2 == we finance the 'oracle USB 2.0 codebase' GPL release via kickstarter (how much would oracle want for their code?) == 3 == we have the specification so we could finance a 'third party GPL USB 2.0 codebase', we could finance this via kickstarter as well -- i would like to have comments on this, especially from oracle. thanks to oracle/sun for making virtualbox open source in the first place - i really love your software. best wishes, joachim schiele _______________________________________________ vbox-dev mailing list [email protected] https://www.virtualbox.org/mailman/listinfo/vbox-dev
