Why do I have to fill out a registration form to use VirtualBox?
The folks behind VirtualBox have released version 3.0 of the application. A lot of interesting and useful new features and bug fixes, which you can read about here.
But when I started the new version for the first time, I was presented with this registration form to fill out:

I thought it was a one-time deal. Guess what? The next time I fired the application up, the registration form appeared again. And there doesn’t seem to be a way to opt out of registering.
But wait … VirtualBox is Open Source. Why should I have to sign up for a Sun account to use it? What’s the point of turning a solid piece of software into something resembling nagware?
Update: My bad (kind of). I seem to be using the full version of VirtualBox, under the Personal Use and Evaluation license. What I find interesting about this is that before version 3.0, I never ran into the registration form. Hmm …
Why are personal, academic, and commercial use lumped together? Doesn’t make as much sense as I think it should — personal and academic users should be given the option to register, as with OpenOffice.org.
Perhaps there need to be three licenses: Open Source, personal/academic use, and business/commercial. That would add an extra wrinkle to development and maintenance, though. Thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment.
That’s more or less the question that
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