On 2025-05-09 John Lange wrote:
VirtualBox is FLOSS no? GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3).
It is by far my favourite desktop VM software. I don't know why it doesn't get more love.
Hmm, my impression from doing a lot of both lately (without having much experience with either) is VB is "less FLOSSy". On Fedora all the kvm/qemu stuff is in Fedora core repos. All the VB stuff is in rpmfusion-free.
The fact it's in rpmfusion hints that it must be in some way non-redistributable like normal packages. The fact it's in the "free" side of the repo means it must still have an O/S license.
In addition, the addons extpack, which seems to pretty much be required for VB to be useful, is not "free as in freedom", only "free as in beer".
Plus, VB to VMware appears to be like Fedora is to RHEL. Or maybe even worse? Maybe like MySQL community to MySQL for-pay? There's probably better metaphors...
And VB is Oracle, which is a big behemoth private company. kvm/qemu just seems to be a typical O/S project.
However, that does explain why VB seems way "more polished" and "easier", as well as the much, much nicer Win(7) support.
One thing I really like is that VB seems to understand people will want to run old OS's/software with it for a long time to come. KVM clearly seems to be jumping on the "oh, your Windows is >1 version behind, screw you" bandwagon.
Disclaimer: VM stuff isn't my wheelhouse, so please correct anything above that is mistaken. _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list -- roundtable@muug.ca To unsubscribe send an email to roundtable-leave@muug.ca