[zibzab]

Friendly reminder that if you install virtualbox with guest services at work, Oracle lawyers will eventually demand a huge sum from your company.

[crad]

Have run into this multiple times with them in multiple companies.

For those asking, it's about the "VitualBox 6.1.32 Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack" - it's free to install but phones home and they reach out after a year or two of use and attempt to coerce you into paying for a license. Just ensure everyone has uninstalled it and tell them to go pound sand.

[notreallyserio]

I did a tiny amount of searching to verify this but came up empty handed. Guest additions (what I think you meant) is GPLv2, so it should be free for use.

[dspillett]

> Guest additions (what I think you meant) is GPLv2

It is presumably referring to “VirtualBox 6.1.32 Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack”:

> Support for USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices, VirtualBox RDP, disk encryption, NVMe and PXE boot for Intel cards.

> The Extension Pack binaries are released under the VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL).

ref: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

[maicro]

I consider the reminder friendly, but definitely not what it implies... Any source on this? By guest services, you mean the additional "click this to install some custom stuff in the running VM so it works better" step? And if so, just after doing that, or VirtualBox in general?

[severino]

What exactly are "guest services" in VirtualBox?

[spicybright]

I think it refers to extra integration features like window resizing, clipboard read/write, drag-n-drop files between guest and host, etc.