[vbox-dev] OSE and RDP / iSCSI

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Steve Radich wrote:
> At CommunityOne it was presented that the open source version was 
> identical with no features missing, however the web site says that it is 
> missing iscsi and rdp, and I assume usb over rdp. The USB seems to be in 
> the OSE (?) from a quick view of the source  tree.

There are just small non-functional bits and pieces of USB in OSE. So 
yes, OSE lacks a few features (iSCSI, RDP and USB, correct), but the 
rest is identical. It's exactly the same virtualization engine code. No 
reduced virtual CPU functionality or decreased performance in the 
VirtualBox OSE source code compared to the binary package. Just a few 
features geared towards commercial customers are not open source.

BTW, 1.6.0 includes VBoxHeadless, which in OSE is completely headless 
(no video output at all). This addresses the request for Linux VMs which 
can be ssh'ed to and don't need any screen.

> The specific question came up of hosting on it and the answer was that 
> was fine, unless I misunderstood (someone else’s question afterwards) 
> and the license specifically says you can’t do that when downloaded.

OSE is released under GPL and CDDE. So there's little Sun can do to keep 
you from distributing sources and/or binaries of VirtualBox OSE.

> Can someone clarify this?

Hope it's clear enough now. The number of things missing from OSE 
changes over time (e.g. for a while the code to create raw 
disk/partition VMDK was missing, but has been added to OSE before 
releasing 1.6.0).

Klaus