Larry Ellison is a cunt. A greedy cunt.

Can you explain why you think Larry Ellison owes you anything?

In another breath some people complain that free software developers are not paid enough/paid at all, and the world can't rely on such an unstable foundation. It seems that some people want it both ways - free software and complain when somebody wants to fund it. The fact that Larry Ellison is rich is irrelevant - some people seem to think he should do it for free, which strikes me as jealousy.

So instead of resorting to nasty slovos, why not get off your arse and get coding up some virtual machine software. And then not charge for it.

If not, reach into your pocket.

Wow. Three thumbs down in just a few minutes. I guess the freeloaders really don't like paying for other people's work.

Explain to me why I should pay Oracle a penny.

You ride a bus. You pay for a ticket.

You eat food. You pay the grocer.

You get your hair cut. You pay your barber.

You use Oracle's software. You pay Oracle.

Or... you use something else. Or... you stop griping and freeloading.

How much should I be paying them?

Why don't you contact Oracle, get the information, and let us all know?

Because don't use their shit, and I don't care about their developers.

Then this does not effect you. Why bother commenting?

Because a lot of my "elected officials" seem to agree with you that the UK owes Oracle a living.

"So you think you should use something and not pay for it." - citation please!

That should be "affect", BTW.

So you think you should use something and not pay for it. That's not even communism.

Perhaps I should use your car and not pay for it.

Why do you think you have a claim on my car? Do you work for oracle?

"Not even communism" - WTF?

Like the bus, train, airplane, taxi etc. you pay them the price they give you.

Now whether that price is worth paying…

I’m sure the mis-selling compensation law firms will be looking at the HP Autonomy case to see if the judgement (namely Autonomy did overvalue their company/product) be more widely applied.

"You ride a bus. You pay for a ticket"

This is more like, you looked at the bus time table, and then have to pay for the ride you might have taken

That's not a valid comparison. You are actually riding the bus in the VB world. The timetable is the license (and FAQ), which clearly tells you the terms.

" This is more like, you looked at the bus time table, and then have to pay for the ride you might have taken "

You look at the timetable, wait at the bus stop, never turns up but your taxes normally pay for the "service" ; the fare is just a fine for having the temerity of actually trying to use the "service." ;)

There is a big notice on the bus: If you ride, you pay.

Except there wasn't a big notice on the oracle website. Some guy actually read the T&C in detail and noticed this. What was free is now charged for AFTER you download. Using your bus analogy, you'd been using the bus systems free downtown only service. One day you get on the bus, they've snapped your photo, identified you, and 3 months after you get off you get an invoice in the mail for 10 bucks. And because there was a 3 month delay in the system, you get for the next 3 months an invoice for 10 bucks. After you got that first one, you stopped riding, but you still owe for all those trips between when they first decided to charge and when you stopped. Now does that sound fair?

The UK Sale of Goods Act and Consumer Protection Act probably have something to say about the misleading/non-existent price information prior to download/purchase.

> You ride a bus. You pay for a ticket.

> You eat food. You pay the grocer.

> You get your hair cut. You pay your barber.

> You use Oracle's software. You pay Oracle.

You missed one...

You download but DO NOT USE Oracle's software. You still pay Oracle.

Not at all. It's the moving of the goalposts that upsets people.

Some people want things to be free forever. They want to freeload on other people's work. If development stopped on the VB extensions, some people would complain and expect it to be free.

Some people spend too much time building straw men because they can't stay on topic.

Bit like HMRC

They make a change, you are responsible for 7 years back "avoidance or whatever"

they make a change and they only deal with it from that time onwards, no going back 7 years for them.,oh no

I download tools, I try them within their trial period or with whatever functions are disabled and if they do what I want I will purchase or contribute - whatever method is there

If I do not use beyond the trial I see no reason to pay for it and this is what this article is saying that if you use the Extension pack and have removed it you could still be hassled.

That is wrong.

@VoiceOfTruth: I think you're missing the point. This isn't in the news because people object to paying for software they use in production, it's about the three-month trial version being charged-for.

If I represented a company that was prepared to commit engineering time, hardware resources and so on in order to explore if VirtualBox would serve us well by consolidating hardware, I certainly wouldn't expect the software vendor to charge me for the test license. I suppose there's possibly a grey area when it comes to full-load testing: It might need to be put into a 'safe' production environment in order to evaluate it under stress conditions - but by the time I'd got that far, I'd know I was serious, they'd know I was serious and I'm sure a reasonable company would be happy to allow finite testing under suitable terms.

By making an evaluation license chargeable, Oracle's conduct is...questionable...the OP is simply offering a summary view!

Thank you for your considered reply. I'm just thumbing my nose at the knee jerk swear words.

I get it all right. But the change is not hidden. It is clear in the licence FAQ on the VB site:

Does the Oracle VirtualBox PUEL provide for trial use of the Oracle VirtualBox Extension Pack software for evaluation purposes?

No, in the past the VirtualBox PUEL provided for 30-day trial use of the VirtualBox Extension Pack software. Trial use has been discontinued with this license.

That is Oracle's prerogative. Some may not like it. I get that. Updating, maintaining, improving, expanding these extensions has costs. Somebody has to pay for it.

Is it still free for personal use?

He doesn't owe software to anyone, he's more than welcome to put his software up for sale and pursue anyone who tries to evade the license just like any other software vendor. The problem is that his business model is more akin to scammers who target tourists by giving them a "free" bracelet and then demand that they pay for it - that's not a free market, it's a shakedown.

> Can you explain why you think Larry Ellison owes you anything?

That's the wrong question, or a "straw man" as some put it.

I either sell stuff or give stuff away via free downloads. I personally actually do both.

But for the stuff I sell, I make it clear upfront, that we are talking about a sale, while, when I give away via free or trial downloads I do not pull a Darth Vader by changing the fine print sneakily after a few years, so a free download somehow turns into an obligation to pay me money.

Doing so is simply dishonest.

That said, while some of their products and services are really good from a technical standpoint, one should simply not touch any Oracle software or service licensing without a legal bomb disposal squad at hand.

Oracle is not a company one should put any form of legal or commercial trust into.

Make sure you understand every word in the contract and be prepared to stand your ground if Oracle pulls one of their stunts.

>> I make it clear upfront

What part of the license, and the FAQ, on the VB web site, is unclear to you? The FAQ is there to clarify the legalise. It's not in the fine print. It is in the FAQ. Point 5:

Does the Oracle VirtualBox PUEL provide for trial use of the Oracle VirtualBox Extension Pack software for evaluation purposes?

No, in the past the VirtualBox PUEL provided for 30-day trial use of the VirtualBox Extension Pack software. Trial use has been discontinued with this license.

That is very clear to me.

Gotta love a guy with selective amnesia. Or, how did that saying go? "You can't convince someone who's paycheck depends on them not being convinced"

By forgetting the history of Oracle and how they "alter the deal" AFTER their product has been used (and legally purchased per the original license), you give the impression that you're an Oracle employee pimping for Oracle.

But I forgot myself - you're just a jerk with an agenda too. Not only about Oracle.

>Larry Ellison is a ...<

Indeed. Just ask CBS.

Same old Oracle "It would be a terrible shame if we had to come round and give you a proper software auditing. We can give you protection against that, but it will cost you plenty of $$$$$"

Wonder how long 'till Oracle charge a client access license fee for VirtualBox.

"I see you are hosting a web-facing service on VirtualBox. Let me see, that makes about 9 billion potential users.' Kerching! One new Larry-yacht paid-for.

The core product is still free-as-in-speech and could be forked if necessary. (I suspect you'd struggle to find maintainers. As far as I can tell from occasionally browsing the forums, it is nearly all Oracle staff doing the hard work at the moment.) This article only concerns the extension pack which for most users contains nothing useful.

Many moons ago, Microsoft licensed SQL server on precisely that basis - until the web took off and they found they'd rather have a smaller share of a large market than a large share of a vanishingly small one.

... about a year ago. I use qemu/kvm now and haven't looked back. My sympathies for those who can't switch to kvm (because they've yet to see the light and adopt Linux).

All this stuff has been covered by libvirt for years now, it really doesn't matter what is underneath. But the bean counters insist on paying somebody, so we get stuff like the Brum council rip-off.

Likewise - we are moving from Virtualbox to KVM/Qemu/Libvirt. Guess we may expedite it.

The spur was a transition back to Debian who, for other reasons, don't have Virtualbox in their Trixie repos.

Also switching over (details in a post below), I'd started the move a few months back when a Kernel update (that I needed) broke VirtualBox, and weeks later still no sign of as fix (is fixed now), so started the shift to QEMU/KVM. Time to pull my finger out and complete the move, and remove VirtualBox!

Guess it's time to bump up the priority of my migration (personal use) of VirtualBox VMs into KVM (Linux is my daily driver). I only really use VMs for testing, so I have virtual versions of my various live environments, such as my desktop OS (Mint), a VR system (Arch), my NAS OS, plus some others just for reference such as Windows 10 and XP (no network), and others for test/evaluation environments (try first, then delete if not used). (These last ones, I'm just going to delete).

I only used VirtualBox as I was on Windows at the time I set things up (a few years back now), and carried on using VirtualBox on Linux, as it was what I was used to (didn't even know about KVM at the time!).

Then VirtualBox just broke after a Kernel update a few months back (all VMs hung on start up), needed the new Kernel to support my then new GFX card (9070XT). So switching back to an old Kernel wasn't really a valid option for me (the issue was fixed eventually, but it took Oracle weeks [*], so bridge burned).

So I started moving to KVM. The only gotcha I've had was that the GUI Virtual Machine Manager (which I was using as I'd not looked at the command line yet), sets up all new machines with a fixed/preallocated size disk (I was used to VirtualBox doing dynamic disks by default). e.g. If you pick 30GiB you get a 30GiB image pre-allocated on disk, and as far as I can tell, there is no option to not do this (in the GUI) and use a dynamic volume instead. Seems they expect most people to use command line to create the VMs (which does allow for dynamic disks) and then only use the GUI afterwards.

Preallocation has it's uses of course, but for me it's just wasting disk space. A quick look into ' qemu-img ' command, and turns out you can basically clone the images, and switch off preallocation as you do it [*]. Once done, swap the new clone with the original one, delete the old, and your done.

* Note 1: I get Virtual box from Oracles repo, so it's not that I was on an ancient version waiting for it to trickle down into my distros repo (Mint).

* Note 2: qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O qcow2 -o preallocation=off inputvm.qcow2 outputvm.qcow2

Edit: Forgot to mention, I'd already moved some over, the ones I was actively using, it's just the less used ones I'd not moved yet. Guess I know what I'm doing tonight after making my Shakshuka!

You don't get that problem if you use the bare commands. E.g.

qemu-img create -f qcow2 alpine.qcow2 8G

creates a file with "holes". If you are testing, text commands are much more effective than GUI actions. Automated > manual.

Thanks, although my local 'testing' is more testing/evaluation of features/updates/software etc inside the VMs, and this is all manual, rather than running say repeatable unit tests or similar.

My usage is things like If I want to test out some new functionality on my NAS (actually a microserver running docker), and especially if it's something that might impact the network (DHCP, DNS etc), then I do that in a VM on an isolated (or locked down etc) virtual LAN first, before I do it on the real system.

I do the same for major updates for some of my 'appliances' (such as my media players, that use Kodi), so in the VM first, check to see if anything breaks, before doing it on the tin (snapshots and backups in use of course).

I've recently been using Qemu to test the net installer on Alpine. I have a small text file with just three commands: the first creates the HD, the second runs the installer VM, and the third runs the installed system.

By my second attempt, I was already benefiting from the repetition and reproducibility. If I had used a GUI, I would have got bored or confused (bloody "sequences") by that point and probably given up!

I recognize that you know this, but it is worth spelling it out here, for "reasons" ;)

It's a few years since I used the option - very easy mapping of USB ports with the Extension Pack

Just in case you don't know (as I had to go check).

From within Oracle VirtualBox Manager

Menu: : File menu > Tools > Extension Pack Manager

Shortcut: Ctrl+T

Mine was empty, so obviously I've never bothered using it, but you can uninstall from here.

Useful date to know if you aren't sure whether you might expect a missive from Larry's toe cutters threatening dire consequences.

I haven't bothered with VB since version 5. The only real use I ever had for VB was getting OS/2 warp running in a VM. I think OS/2 used some obscure x86 instruction that trapped under Xen or Kvm but was handled by VB. All pretty ghastly really.

There are several "rings" in x86 architecture and OS/2 is unusual in using more than just 2. Most things use 0 for kernel and 1 for user space. OS/2 uses ring 2 as well and not all hypervisors emulate it correctly (or maybe at all). VBox came from Innotek software, a German company that used to write OS/2 software so they made it work.

Innotek got bought by Sun(?) and then acquired by Oracle which is how Oracle ended up with it. I don't think Oracle bought Innotek directly, I think they acquired it via another purchase but I may be wrong about it being Sun.