Johnny Hughes wrote:
The FULL version is the one that is available from the site as an RPM (VirtualBox-1.5.4_27034_rhel5-1.i586.rpm) and is the binary only app. It is *_NOT_OPEN_SOURCE_* and *_NOT_REDISTRIBUTABLE_*. That version has all the bells and whistles (usb, iSCSI support, RDP Support, etc.). That version is only available for personal use and not available for use in businesses without a paid license, there is no SRPM for it.
The Open Source Edition (OSE) is the tarball that is not an RPM:
http://www.virtualbox.org/download/1.5.4/VirtualBox-1.5.4_OSE.tar.bz2
It is integrated into ubuntu, gentoo, debian unstable and maybe some others, is open source (GPLv2), and it is usable by everyone. It does not have an RPM or binary available from the site (the tarball is Source aonly files that need compiled) and it does not have usb, iSCSI, RDP, support.
This was the reason I wanted to use the OSE (GPLv2) version--I was working with some people who needed to support a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine, and by using VirtualBox OSE they only had to worry about licensing Windows (?!) as opposed to BOTH Windows AND VMware Server.
I also think it's nice to have a ready-to-download GPL version because it provides a mechanism where people who don't have Xen-ready hardware can experiment with virtualization, and it's much smaller (but admittedly far less capable) than VMware Server...
To make this OSE version into an RPM will take some work, but I personally would not use it very much as I would probably need usb and rdp support for any VM I create ... so that is why I brought it up.
I've made a stab at some of this work, as posted previously:
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-virt/2007-November/000106.html
One of the things I wanted to change from the commercial version was to make use of DKMS to build the kernel module(s) automagically.
See this for any questions:
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions
<snip>
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
-Greg