Re: Discuss: Mount any VBox-compatible disk image on the hos
Posted: 30. Aug 2013, 15:17
There has been work on vdfuse quite recently to make it build with the latest VirtualBox versions: https://github.com/Thorsten-Sick/vdfuse - first of all a big thank you for his effort.
Since the VirtualBox developers always wanted to have such functionality (though I have to say that all existing solutions are not sufficiently safe for our taste because they don't lock the images and also are hairy to use with snapshots) I'm willing to use this as a starting point for our work, and the first step would be 'adopting' it. This means it'd be part of the VirtualBox tree, and most likely still have to be built separately, and initially we probably won't be able to do much more than keeping the code compatible with the rest of the code. What we ultimately want is a platform-independent (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, ...), end-user compatible version which means that it has to rule out the risk of data loss/corruption due to using images inconsistently or by a VM and vdfuse simultaneously.
One of the stoppers for doing this is the license of the code, currently GPLv2+. We're not able to take contributions with this license (see https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Contributor_information). Since there are 4 people who have changed this code I guess the easiest solution to get this into the tree is if all of them (h2o, Terry Ellison, Gordon Miller, Thorsten Sick). Thorsten already told me that he's fine with MIT licensing his changes, this leaves 3 contributors who'd need to agree. Note that once the code is in our tree it will be GPLv2 licensed, we use MIT only as an 'incoming' license to keep the people in the legal department happy.
Can I get a "I'm fine with submitting my vdfuse contribution to VirtualBox under the MIT license" from all contributors? If there are any questions/uncertainties let me know personally, I don't want to clutter this useful discussion topic with administrativa. Hope I made it clear enough that we don't have any plans to take this code away from anyone.
Since the VirtualBox developers always wanted to have such functionality (though I have to say that all existing solutions are not sufficiently safe for our taste because they don't lock the images and also are hairy to use with snapshots) I'm willing to use this as a starting point for our work, and the first step would be 'adopting' it. This means it'd be part of the VirtualBox tree, and most likely still have to be built separately, and initially we probably won't be able to do much more than keeping the code compatible with the rest of the code. What we ultimately want is a platform-independent (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, ...), end-user compatible version which means that it has to rule out the risk of data loss/corruption due to using images inconsistently or by a VM and vdfuse simultaneously.
One of the stoppers for doing this is the license of the code, currently GPLv2+. We're not able to take contributions with this license (see https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Contributor_information). Since there are 4 people who have changed this code I guess the easiest solution to get this into the tree is if all of them (h2o, Terry Ellison, Gordon Miller, Thorsten Sick). Thorsten already told me that he's fine with MIT licensing his changes, this leaves 3 contributors who'd need to agree. Note that once the code is in our tree it will be GPLv2 licensed, we use MIT only as an 'incoming' license to keep the people in the legal department happy.
Can I get a "I'm fine with submitting my vdfuse contribution to VirtualBox under the MIT license" from all contributors? If there are any questions/uncertainties let me know personally, I don't want to clutter this useful discussion topic with administrativa. Hope I made it clear enough that we don't have any plans to take this code away from anyone.