[vbox-dev] VirtualBox Additions License

[Klaus Espenlaub]

It's unfortunately complicated, as you might have guessed from the large
numbers of platforms covered...

The vast majority of the GA ISO contents (the stuff for Linux, Windows
and macOS) is easily within the limits.

However, the OS/2 GA have a significant amount of IBM copyrighted code
from the driver development kit (more than just headers). What we
provide is therefore in a way open source (and anyone can use the
sources to rebuild), but the license isn't one of the usual (IIRC it
doesn't allow changing sources, just distributing binaries)...

The issue with downloading GA should be fixed with the next update of 6.0.

Klaus

On 31.05.2019 19:51, Larry Finger wrote:
> I am aware of at least two reports of difficulty in downloading the
> VirtualBox Additions from within the GUI, namely
> https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1132102
> and
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=929074.
> 
> This message is not to report the problem, but to inquire what license
> is applied to the additions ISO. One of my users would like me to add
> the ISO to our official packages. I am still deciding whether adding the
> additional size to our packages is a good idea; however, if the license
> is not compatible with openSUSE, that makes the decision easier.
> 
> Larry