Be careful about VirtualBox Extensions which is non free on commercial environments. Oracle is hunting non compliance and VB provides them with lots of telemetry.
I vaguely recall that this was discussed here on HN a while ago and somebody who had actually tried to buy the necessary license reported that Oracle would not sell them the license; IIRC, the sales person told them to "just use it, we don't care", or something along those lines.
Which is very problematic, of course, without something in writing, and given Oracle's reputation.
If you live in a one-party state, secretly record them and then if Oracle threatens to sue, show them the recording and remind them of promissory estoppel.
Not really promissory estoppel, which can enforce a promise if you detrimentally relied on it. It's not really to your detriment to use the product for free, so it's not a perfect fit (unless maybe your company hired someone to administer the VMs, specifically based on his VirtualBox experience?).
Some other possibilities would be the parol evidence rule (verbal exchanges between the contracting parties and their effect on contract interpretation) and possibly laches (no equitable remedy for folks who know about an infringement on their rights and do nothing about it... but money damages isn't an equity claim).
(IAAL but I don't practice in this area, so same grain of salt applies)
§ 90. Promise Reasonably Inducing Action or Forbearance
(1) A promise which the promisor should reasonably expect to induce action or forbearance on the part of the promisee or a third person and which does induce such action or forbearance is binding if injustice can be avoided only by enforcement of the promise. The remedy granted for breach may be limited as justice requires.
If Oracle says "go ahead and use it" and then sues you for having used it, they lose. If they sue you to stop using it going forward, they win.
I can understand how you'd think that, reading the text of the rule in the Restatement. However, at common law - and as shown in the examples if you'd keep reading - there has to be some detrimental reliance. Being able to use a product isn't in an of itself to your detriment. However, hiring someone based on that understanding might be.
A, knowing that B is going to college, promises B that A will give him $ 5,000 on completion of his course. B goes to college, and borrows and [[[spends more than $ 5,000 for college expenses.]]] When he has nearly completed his course, A notifies him of an intention to revoke the promise. A's promise is binding and B is entitled to payment on completion of the course without regard to whether his performance was “bargained for” under § 71.
(detrimental reliance in triple square brackets)
I have a hard time imagining a case being granted summary judgment for the defendant just because Oracle's customer sales rep told him "we don't really care."
In all honesty, the legal issue is more likely to be whether the person on the phone had apparent authority to grant a license. Even if a promissory estoppel theory would work, the person speaking to you would still have to be in some position (or appear to be in some position) to bind Oracle to a promise he/she made.
> In Germany, it is illegal to record phone conversations without the consents of the other party.
Hence, "If you live in a one-party state."
> Also, I don't think Oracle is going to sue over something like this.
Check the other comments in the thread. People are reporting that Oracle is taking IP addresses of people who access the extensions site and if the IP address belongs to a company, they contact the company and threaten to sue.
I am sorry. In Germany, there is no such thing as a "one-party state". :-|
> People are reporting that Oracle is taking IP addresses of people who access the extensions site and if the IP address belongs to a company, they contact the company and threaten to sue.
Thank you for pointing this out. I stand corrected.
That's awkward as hell. It's sad that their offering is the only decent one out there (for my needs and with that UX) that's at least got open source options. I hope VirtualPC from Microsoft becomes cross-platform and open sourced, or at least some sort of new VM software from Microsoft, since they seem to be doing a better job at offering up MIT licensed projects lately.
I wouldn't even mind shelling out $50 for a license if I needed one, but they won't let me. It takes $5000, because they require a purchase of 100 or more at a time. It feels like they don't want to spend time on small stuff, and really don't care.
This was my experience 6-7 years ago (shortly after the Sun/Oracle acquisition). Couldn't get a straight answer from anyone about how to license it (despite wanting to roll out many thousands of seats using it in a commercial product).
Good question. They don't want to sell them. Just based on the website the licenses are only sold in 5000 unit blocks.
The fact that they didn't want to take my money forced me to learn KVM and libvirt. That turned out to work better and be way easier to manage remotely.
Hmm, there used to be an "ose" edition which lacked some usb patch through stuff I believe, it's not related to that? Haven't seen that in a while but it used to be 2 separate downloads...
So it's not any of that stuff you can select on the "Custom Setup" screen then...
This is not necessarily straightforward. Also, Oracle has form.
On the page cited there's no reference to licence/license. Fair enough - it's a release notes page. The only sub-page (using the menu on the left) that contains any reference to licence is the Contributors page, which isn't somewhere most users would head to.
The primary page - https://www.virtualbox.org/ - has one reference to Licence - and that's as part of the assurance that VirtualBox is "an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License".
And if you read that, assumed the best, and went on your way, you'd soon be in breach.
(Yes, you should probably visit https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ despite the above assurance on the front page -- at which point you'd learn about the Extension pack, the PUEL, and other usage constraints.)
This is Oracle. The Extension Pack has additional features particularly valuable in an enterprise environment, BUT there is no way to actually buy a commercial license and as per some other threads Oracle salespeople are advising enterprise customers to just use it anyway.
Oracle setting a licensing trap they can spring at their whim? Perish the thought!
It is unbelieveable that a company which employs such tactics against their users can survive. I know I avoid their products like plague, Java and DB included.
The extension pack is extremely easy to download by accident: for instance, it comes in the default Chocolately installation unless you pass a flag to disable it. With Oracle actively going around and sending threatening letters to enterprises with extensions download traffic coming from their IP blocks, it's easy to accidentally get in a bad situation.
I'm pretty sure the GP means: Be careful not to install unlicensed proprietary software thinking it's part of the free software that has basically the same name.
sometimes you just want a simple vb ubuntu vm. however virtualbox locks copy paste from host to vm support behind extensions which are free only for personal use(which you are using but good luck proving that in court)
No. Copy-paste is not locked behind the VirtualBox Extension Pack. It requires the Guest Additions, which are completely different from the Extension Pack.
Extension Pack gives things such as USB passthrough.
It's kinda weird that VirtualPC way back when is the only VM software I recall using that had copy-paste without guest extensions. Granted, it just typed text into the keyboard, but it was really handy none the less.
That is indeed a problem :-) I had to bump up the delay between characters and particularly slow connections or serial consoles still can bite me. Mostly I still consider it worth using though, since fixing a few small typos is less work than typing the whole thing by hand.
Sorry. I have never heard of this. I switched to VB earlier this year for simple home use testing apps and working with large data sets. VMWare Fusion just caused me to many problems.
Well when Fusion doesn’t run, vm’s become corrupt and VMWare answers your support query with “your new MacBook Pro must have a hardware issue”. Yes, I did switch. They lost my $80/year for upgrades and I have been a user since v3.
And Virtual Box has been more reliable than Fusion ever was for me.
