Hi!
I know it's been a long time since the last post here, but, the question has not been really answered, as far as I can see.
The short answer: The distributed ISO Guest Additions are PUEL licensed, NOT open source.
This is also visible in the formal PUEL license description.
Technically,
* the OSE code contains the GA code, but not all of it.
* the GA iso distributed (up to including 3.2.x, see below) is PUEL licensed because it contains code that is not part of the OSE source distribution (esp. the shared folders access code for windows, which contains either NDA stuff, or 3rd party code, I don't remember).
As not all code of the GA is distributed, the license headers of the source code do NOT apply to the (all off the) iso distribution!
I think the difference only really apply to windows. Linuxes should not be affected, as all linux GA source code is distributed and included in most distributions. No idea about other OSes.
This may be in the process of changing for the 4.0.0 version, where the distributed binary of VBox contains only OSE code (and is no longer PUEL), while the PUEL parts are distributed as extension packs.
I have not yet found "extension packs" for the GA, yet, and the iso seems to contain the shared folders, thus, is still PUEL.
Unfortunately, I have no yet managed to compile the 4.0.0 version for windows as the development tools used by oracle are "in transition" between VS05 and old DDK, and VS10 and Vista/Win7 DDK, and no information can be obtained about a working setup. This is to be changed with the later 4.0.x releases .. hopefully.
On the other hand, it would not really be a problem for Oracle to distribute an OSE version of the GA, as well ... this would also remove the cause of errors like "vboxservice.exe waiting endlessly for something that is initialised by the filesystem driver not present in the OSE edition" ... (own experience, solved around 3.2.4).
I am not part of VirtualBox, but maintain the (only?) public VBox GA win32 distribution on
http://code.google.com/p/virtual-box-wi ... installer/. It seems there are not many people outside of Innotek/Sun/Oracle that compile VBox for windows (and can talk about it in public) ... while a lot do for linux.
I cannot tell when a OSE version of the 4.0.0 GA will be available, especially, as I just found out my work usage of VirtualBox IS in fact covered by the PUEL ...
Yours,
Sebastian