On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:28 AM, Neil Bothwick <n...@digimed.co.uk> wrote: > On Wed, 3 Feb 2010 09:29:40 -0800, Mark Knecht wrote: > >> I guess that you're correct that it's been crippled a bit but >> according to this page it doesn't seem that bad to me: >> >> http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions >> >> I don't personally need the USB stuff inside of VB so for me it >> might be enough. > > It seems a little underhand to me, either its open source or it isn't. > There's no good technical reason to not release the USB source, only > commercial reasons. > > > -- > Neil Bothwick > > The quickest way to a man's heart is through his sternum. > I agree, but it may be that Sun had licensed stuff like this from someone else prior to making the project Open Source and cannot release it.
It would be great if it got rewritten from scratch by someone not involved so that it could be 100% Open Source, but practically speaking it won't be an issue in terms of running the platform for most people today. I didn't like some of the language on that page where they said: "It is functionally equivalent to the full VirtualBox package, except for a few features that primarily target enterprise customers." I don't like it when they say 'functionally equivalent' as it makes me think it's not __exactly__ the same code. There may have been other portions of the code they couldn't release into Open Source so some of it has been rewritten already.... - Mark
