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1) It's GPL'd so nothing is stopping you or anyone else from forking it away from Oracle. 2) The Open Watcom compiler is not required to build VirtualBox at all. The actual compiler is free for anyone to download and use.[1]

Other people here raised some legitimate points with the build and patch submission process that I also would like to see improved, but yours are just narrow minded prejudice.

[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12011




VirtualBox is only partially open source and free:

For example, USB2.0 and RDP support is non-free.

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ

Also note that they do openly admit that stopping to release under GPL 2.0 is not planned, but possible and they reserve the right to do so in future.


Please tell this to the Debian team (that they're narrow minded and prejudice) because I'd like them to move VB off of contrib (non free) to their free repos.




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