On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 1:24 PM, Jonathan Matthews
<cont...@jpluscplusm.com> wrote:
They got borged by Oracle, IIRC, leaving them with at least 3
> different virtual platforms: virtualbox, solaris zones, virtual iron.
> Ooo, and maybe one more whose name escapes me. They also bought up
> Q-Layer, who were *great* ... and then dropped it entirely.
>
> OVM - that's what I was thinking of. Oracle VM, a RHEL-based Xen
> product with a web UI. Not too shabby, but why would you /bother/?
>
> ISTR there are some more exceptions than /just/ USB, but can't recall
> them at the moment.
>
> I'd honestly not recommend an Oracle-owned product at this point.
> They're showing themselves to be too hostile to FLOSS to trust them.
> And while I /know/ virtualbox is good and useful, the (relatively
> small!) extra work required to get KVM+libvirt (i.e. virt-manager)
> going will repay you many times over for the greater control and
> understanding you'll have of the underlying system. IMHO
>
IIRC, MySQL is another one that has been called into question do to Oracle's
resent acquisition of Sun Microsystems Products.
As to Shawn's response: "per the source of virtualbox - oracle owns it.
however, it is all
under a gpl type license exept the usb driver which is close source."
GPL protect the current incarnation of a project, what's to stop Oracle from
release ver5 that *is not* under the GPL licence and the same name?
Also keep in mind that when Oracle acquired Open Office, the Sub Developers
on the project left/quit the project (to start LibreOffice).
GPL doesn't promise future freedom when someone else legally buy's the
rights to the source and changes it. That being said, Final versions of a
program released under GPL or another F/OSS licence allows that snapshot in
time of the code to remain unchanged(9and thus still free for another
developer group/project to pickup and continue)
These are very real fears being expressed all over Open Source communities,
it has been of much debate on the FreeBSD mailing lists as well as Gentoo.
--
Did you know...
If you play a Windows 2000 CD backwards, you hear satanic messages,
but what's worse is when you play it forward....
...it installs Windows 2000
-- Alfred Perlstein on chat at freebsd.org
