[vbox-dev] VirtualBox Extension Pack going GPL?

[Joachim Schiele]

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