[vbox-dev] VirtualBox Extension Pack going GPL?

[Pau Garcia i Quiles]

Hello,

We developed our own RDP-like protocol for use with WPF. It's quite naïve
(take IFrameBuffer and send PNG's with the changed area, then paint it) but
it works fine for LANs, which is our use case. It's GPL and developed in
C#. We developed it for two reasons:

- The most important one: it was impossible to OEM license VirtualBox. We
contacted Sun, then Oracle, multiple times for years. In the end, our
product was ready to sell and still had no OEM licensing rates (just a "you
can distribute it for free for now")
- Also important: embedding the RDP ActiveX in WPF causes all sorts of
problems. We literally spent man-months debugging this and implementing all
kind of workarounds. Our own implementation was ready in less than a week
by one person.

Maybe KickStarting a fully opensource (BSD license, please) Guest Additions
would get traction.

What worries me is whether an initiative like this would definitely kill
VirtualBox. Oracle recently nixed every virtualization product it inherited
from Sun but VirtualBox.


On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 7:38 PM, Huihong Luo <huisinro at yahoo.com> wrote:

> As for vrdp, I've been working on using FreeRDP, not fully working yet,
> but it is very positive, also made the remoteUSB to work too.
>
> For the remaining portions of the extension pack, I don't have any ideas.
> Basically, USB + VRDP considered to be done, provided a nice payment. It
> took me one year.
>
>   ------------------------------
>  *From:* Oliver Loch <o.loch at gmx.net>
> *To:* Huihong Luo <huisinro at yahoo.com>
> *Cc:* Joachim Schiele <js-vbox at lastlog.de>; "vbox-dev at virtualbox.org" <
> vbox-dev at virtualbox.org>
> *Sent:* Friday, July 19, 2013 10:30 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [vbox-dev] VirtualBox Extension Pack going GPL?
>
> Gimme your bank account I'll send you an Euro for your effort.
>
> Am 19.07.2013 um 19:21 schrieb Huihong Luo <huisinro at yahoo.com>:
>
> I do have a complete implementation of the USB 2.0 (fully compatible to
> vbox), if someone pays, I can submit my code as open source.
>
>   ------------------------------
>  *From:* Joachim Schiele <js-vbox at lastlog.de>
> *To:* vbox-dev at virtualbox.org
> *Sent:* Friday, July 19, 2013 8:50 AM
> *Subject:* [vbox-dev] VirtualBox Extension Pack going GPL?
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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>


-- 
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)
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