Oracle freshens its VirtualBox The VirtualBox hypervisor now under the control of Oracle - if any open source software project can be said to be under control of any corporation - has been updated with a 3.1.6 release. The 3.1.6 maintenance release follows a true "major" release that came out of the project last November, when VirtualBox 3.1 was given the …
Oracle doesn't seem to be keeping up with all the responsability that running open source projects require. It looks like all the open source legacy that they inherited from Sun is a strange body within Oracle.
You can take OpenSolaris, for instance. So far the 2010.1H release (which was called 2010.2 then 2010.3 and now who knows) hasn't been delivered yet and no formal statement by Oracle about it or anything resembling a roadmap.
They're slowly putting out a schedule of things. Just seems they're still trying to decide what to do with everything they just bought from Sun. And how to make money off of things.
It appears with the buyout the next release for Solaris has been slipped. OpenSolaris appears to not be affected with a slip, but it looks like Oracle is trying to figure out how they'll make money off of it.
The seamless integration is cool, but that's just eye candy really.
The ability to run the images headless AND to have it's own RDP host is the cow's conkers.
The user license is also very liberal, and the community is great.
Just a shame the USB support is still a bit shaky.
Oh, and some MS products run like a dog (but that could be more the fault of MS than of VBox).
Have a hosted Linux show you 3d Compiz magic on a windows box is pretty trippy!
...and this is what is good about F/OSS. If enough people find that VBox scratches their itch, if Oracle do something stupid a new version will come from another quarter befor you can say "Fork in hell!"
A F/OSS version would lose USB etc, but I am sure a way around that would be found.
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