Hope for USB support?

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2010 11:55:00 -0500
> From: "Sam Fourman Jr." <sfourman at gmail.com>
> 
> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 11:29 AM, Kevin Oberman <oberman at es.net> wrote:
> > I know that it is a long shot, especially with Oracle at the helm VB on
> > the corporate side, but USB support for VirtualBox is the one piece I am
> > missing that forces me to keep a bootable Windows system around.
> >
> > Is there any hope of seeing USB on VB with FreeBSD as the host and
> > Windows as the guest OS?
> 
> I could use this as well, and I know of at least 2 others.
> 
> I guess a good starting point would be to ask, what is the scope of
> work that needs to be done to add USB support to Virtual box in
> FreeBSD

I probably should explain that this is both a legal and technical
issue. VB USB support contains third-party proprietary code. This is the
reason that USB support is only available on the binary version of
VB. It is clearly listed as part of Closed-source distributions.

I was told some time ago that Sun was attempting to get licensing for
this code to allow it to be open-sourced, but it was obviously not a
trivial hurdle for them and I suspect Oracle has a bit less committent
to open-source.

The bottom line is that this is NOT a trivial issue in any way and will
be difficult to get unless those who have access to the proprietary code
can provide the FreeBSD bits and distribute a CSE distribution for
FreeBSD. 
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634
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