On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Adam Moffett <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Are the two products complementary, or is Oracle competing with itself? >> It seems that some people go around questioning why some software >> exists, as if there should be only one. I guess it would be better for >> you if it were killed?.
> Nope. I'm just afraid to invest a lot of my time and money into it and > then have Oracle decide that they don't need it and pull the plug on it. I *did* invest both time and money into VirtualBox development, testing and documentation, because it is very important. The license is GPL, which is the ultimate guarantor of my investment. Oracle can't really kill Open-Source software. There is always the threat of a fork by the Open-Source community, should things go wrong. There were 2 recent precedents - OpenSolaris and OpenOffice cases, where community decided to actively protect their interests and investment. I don't think a fork will happen with VirtualBox in the coming years, but the *threat* of such a fork will keep VirtualBox around, and all parties honest. History proved times and times again, that it is really hard to _kill_ a GPL project. Basically with GPL license in place, you can invest and sleep well. -- -Alexey Eromenko "Technologov", VirtualBox community member. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ AppSumo Presents a FREE Video for the SourceForge Community by Eric Ries, the creator of the Lean Startup Methodology on "Lean Startup Secrets Revealed." This video shows you how to validate your ideas, optimize your ideas and identify your business strategy. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appsumosfdev2dev _______________________________________________ VBox-users-community mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/vbox-users-community
