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On 15 January 2007, a GmbH from Weinstadt, Germany, released the code for the hypervisor it used with governments and banks. The product was called VirtualBox. Within a year it passed four million downloads; in February 2008, Sun bought Innotek; in January 2010, Oracle arrived. Nineteen years later, VirtualBox 7.2.16 (18 August 2026) is still the most common way to run Linux on Windows \u2014 and Windows on Linux \u2014 without paying for VMware.<\/p>\n
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InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH was founded in 1992 in Stuttgart\/Weinstadt. Its original business was legacy systems: German companies stuck on OS\/2 and IBM mainframes. Virtualization was the only way to avoid rewriting everything. Co-founder and director Achim Hasenmueller came from systems development at IBM. In 2001, Innotek fully entered virtualization: it co-developed Virtual PC and Virtual Server with Connectix, later bought by Microsoft. The \u201cadditions\u201d code \u2014 shared clipboard, resizing the guest window \u2014 originated there, in Virtual PC, and reappeared in VirtualBox.<\/p>\n
Its own hypervisor began around 2004, still closed source, already running in German authorities (SINA workstations still use VirtualBox today). No venture capital. Innotek lived on projects and commercial licenses.<\/p>\n
The public version shipped on 15 January 2007, with advice from LiSoG (now Open Source Business Alliance). Dual license: the Open Source Edition (OSE) under GPLv2, and the full binary free for personal use and evaluation (PUEL), paid for commercial deployment. Windows and Linux 32-bit hosts at first; guests from DOS to OS\/2, NetWare, Windows, and Linux.<\/p>\n
Hasenmueller was direct: Innotek was too small to compete with VMware's marketing. Opening the code was the only way for the product to exist outside Germany. In 2007, the company earned seven figures with free VirtualBox. By February 2008, more than four million downloads. Without the GPL, Sun would not even have noticed.<\/p>\n
On 12 February 2008, Sun announced the acquisition (it closed on day 20). Price undisclosed \u2014 \u201cnot material to EPS.\u201d Jonathan Schwartz was riding the open source wave: MySQL had cost US$ 1 billion the previous month. VirtualBox would complement xVM Server (Xen) in the datacenter and bring the Sun brand to developers' laptops, alongside OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, GlassFish, and NetBeans.<\/p>\n
Hasenmueller called Sun a \u201cdream partner.\u201d The product became Sun xVM VirtualBox. Mac and OpenSolaris hosts left beta. The community followed. Two years later, Sun was gone.<\/p>\n
Oracle completed the Sun acquisition in January 2010. The name became Oracle VM VirtualBox. On 22 December 2010, 4.0 ended the OSE\/PUEL split: the base<\/em> product became GPLv2 (including installer, documentation, and drivers), and the closed components became the Extension Pack<\/strong> \u2014 USB 2\/3, RDP, PXE, later disk encryption and NVMe. Anyone who only wants a Linux VM on the desktop uses the base. Anyone needing USB 3 and VRDP installs the pack (PUEL: personal, education, evaluation; commercial use is paid).<\/p>\n That licensing structure lasts to this day, with one adjustment: starting with 7.1 (September 2024), the base package is GPLv3<\/strong>, with a linking exception for CDDL and other incompatible licenses. The Extension Pack remains proprietary.<\/p>\n Type 2 hypervisor: runs on top of the host OS, not in its place. VT-x \/ AMD-V when the processor allows it; through 6.0 there was still a software path (CSAM\/PATM, a QEMU-style dynamic recompiler for real mode and BIOS). In 6.1 (December 2019), software-only support was dropped \u2014 a CPU with hardware virtualization became mandatory.<\/p>\n The rest is what made the blue cube a lab standard:<\/p>\n On Linux, KVM\/QEMU is the kernel's \u201creal\u201d hypervisor \u2014 type 1, with KVM. VirtualBox never competed with that on servers. It competed on laptops: Windows host, Ubuntu guest, one click. That is why it survived Oracle, Sun's demise, and the container era.<\/p>\n 7.2.10 (June 2026) gained initial support for Linux kernel 7.1. 7.2.16 shipped on 18 August 2026. Linux hosts on Oracle's website range from Ubuntu 22.04 to 26.04 (Resolute), Debian 11\u201313, Fedora, and openSUSE.<\/p>\n Full USB 2\/3, Intel PXE, and whatever Oracle has not yet returned to the GPL remain in the pack. PUEL: one machine, noncommercial use. Companies buy Named Workstation. Confusing \u201cfree to download\u201d with \u201cI can pile it into the company lab\u201d is the classic way to get a compliance surprise. The base binary, GPLv3, may be redistributed \u2014 the pack may not, without a contract.<\/p>\n On servers, KVM. On the desktop, the cube still solves the cases libvirt makes tedious: Windows on Fedora, an old Debian on Ubuntu, a snapshot before updating the kernel. To take the VM elsewhere, OVA. To land on XCP-ng \/ XenServer, the path we documented in ova2xva<\/a> \u2014 without The broader history \u2014 UNIX, the kernel, the desktop \u2014 is in The History of Operating Systems<\/a>, The history of Linus Torvalds<\/a> and Linux turns 35<\/a>.<\/p>\n From Weinstadt to Redwood: VirtualBox remains the hypervisor that fits on a laptop. 7.2.16, GPLv3 in the base, ARM on Mac, kernel 7.1 in the guest. The blue cube still spins.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On January 15, 2007, a GmbH in Weinstadt, Germany, released the code of the hypervisor it used with government and banking customers. The product was called VirtualBox. Within a year, it exceeded four million downloads; in February 2008, Sun bought Innotek; in January 2010, Oracle arrived. Nineteen years \u2026 Read more<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,2,111],"tags":[210,208,209,206,207,140,138],"class_list":["post-514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-infra","category-linux","category-opensource","tag-hypervisor","tag-innotek","tag-kvm","tag-oracle","tag-sun","tag-virtualbox","tag-virtualizacao"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1179,"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions\/1179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What VirtualBox taught on the desktop<\/h2>\n
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VBoxManage<\/code> for anyone who does not want a GUI.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nFrom 5.0 to 7.2: Windows 11, ARM, GPLv3<\/h2>\n
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The Extension Pack, still<\/h2>\n
Timeline<\/h2>\n
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And Linux in all this<\/h2>\n
xe<\/code>.<\/p>\n