VMWare Fusion, on the other hand, powers the desktop environment I've used as a daily work machine for the last 6 months, and I've had absolutely zero problems other than trackpad scrolling getting emulated as mouse wheel events (making pixel-perfect scroll impossible).
Despite that one annoyance, it's definitely worth paying for if you're using it for any serious or professional purpose.
VirtualBox itself is GPL. There is no lawsuit risk.
What requires "commercial considerations" is the extension pack.
The extension pack is required for:
> USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices, VirtualBox RDP, disk encryption, NVMe and PXE boot for Intel cards
If licensing needs to be considered (ie. in a corporate environment), but one doesn't need the functionalities above, then there's no issue.
It might be, but let's just say that Oracle aren't big fans of $WORK, and our founders are big fans of them. Thus our legal department are rather tetchy about anything that could give them even the slightest chance of doing anything.
> What requires "commercial considerations" is the extension pack.
And our legal department are nervous about that being installed, even by accident, so they prefer to minimise the possibility.
Is the expectation here that firms offering software under non-commercial-use-is-free licenses just run it entirely on the honour system? And isn't it true that many firms use unlicensed software, hence the need for audits?
They can also apply stronger heuristics, like popping up a dialogue box if the computer is centrally-managed (e.g.: Mac MDM, Windows domain, Windows Pro/Enterprise, etc.).
The (commercially licensed) Extensions pack provide "Support for USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices, VirtualBox RDP, disk encryption, NVMe and PXE boot for Intel cards"[1] and some other functionality e.g. webcam passthrough [2]. There may be additional functionality enabled by the Extension pack I cannot find at a glance, but those are the main things.
[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads [2] https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing
With my MBP as host and Ubuntu as guest, I found that VirtualBox (with and without guest extensions installed) had a lot of graphical performance issues that Fusion did not.