VirtualBox Fork – Why hasn’t one gone main stream?
Ever since the Oracle acquisition of Sun, I had been on the fence on what to think about Oracle and its open source business. However when Oracle turned its back on the OpenSolaris Community and the OpenOffice community it immediately changed my mind on what I thought about Oracle. I abandoned all the projects they were supporting, I was a long time Netbeans user and I made the switch Eclipse. The day the Open Document Foundation released LibreOffice I switched.
There is still one Oracle project I still use that is Virtualbox. If I was exclusively a Linux user I would just be using KVM with Virt-Manager and I would be set but I also have a Mac and Windows Box that I like to run virtual machines on. I try to sick with OSS whenever I can but I have thought about buying VMware Workstation and Fusion but I don’t want to pay for either because Virtualbox does everything I need it to do.
So how about a fork of Virtualbox? Most of the code is under the GPL, I really think the community will support a fork of Virtualbox and I think it would be a better project without Oracle’s direction. If there was support from Red Hat or Canonical I’m sure this would have happened a long time ago but there are plenty of projects with out corporate support.
Why should it be forked? Oracle could shutdown that project like they did with OpenSolaris. Oracle’s history with Open Source should make everyone in the community that contributes to Virtualbox want to start over with a new project. I found one fork but I couldn’t find a link to the source or to the packages. The Project is called IceBox Virtual Machine by a company called Twisted Lincoln Inc. They also have their own Linux Distribution called Nexradix. I presume Icebox is in the repo’s for that distro (I haven’t installed it).
If some unknown company that is supporting an unknown Linux distribution can fork Virtualbox, the greater community should do it. Whether if that is supporting Icebox or creating a new one, it needs to happen and soon.
I tend to agree. I’m in a similar situation, and I would migrate to KVM on OpenIndiana but for the absence of support for AMD CPUs. Aside from that the only other Oracle product I regularly use is GlassFish:
http://blog.davekoelmeyer.co.nz/2012/01/15/forking-glassfish/
Oracle burned up their community goodwill a long, long, long time ago – the mere thought that they are directly involved in any of the products I rely on has me really wishing there was an forked alternative.