Ask HN: Why does Oracle keep VirtualBox alive? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why does Oracle keep VirtualBox alive?

4 pointszenlikethat5 comments

Myself and a friend are discussing this and honestly can't figure out why. It definitely is widely used, but we don't see how it is anything other than a cost center like Oracle. If it was a company with open source in their blood I would understand, but it kind of baffles me why Oracle has kept VBox alive for so long, almost like it's out of some sense of obligation to the huge community which is using it.

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I would guess this is their attempt at going after the virtualization market. They bought Sun for the hardware(among other things) so now they need the software. VMware was probably too expensive for them.

VirtualBox is not in the same playing field as VMware but it does work well and is popular etc. The team already knows how to build virtualization software. To me they're just missing some management tools.

Big companies like Google and Oracle don't really think about what's coming next year. Sometimes they invest in something that will pay off big in 10 years. I think this is one of those deals.

This is pure guesswork obviously. I have no idea...

My guess is that many of their customers want to run Oracle software inside VMs. Probably big server farms that want VM containers it can deploy, boot, and reboot quickly as needed. For enough VMs, a VMWare or Parallels license will add up.

This is probably true, but VB is not servergrade VM software I believe. In those cases you use Xen or VMware. Virtualbox is for the desktop.

First, I think many engineers at Oracle use it to test software locally without having to fallback on complex solutions. Second, it's probably a small development team, maybe three or four FTE, and how much money is that for a company like Oracle? VMware licenses are probably more expensive.

dottrap made a good point. Adding to it, perhaps someone could chime in on whether the company uses VirtualBox internally.

Yes, they do. E.g., excellent tool for testing server products on developer systems. It's free. It works.

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