virtualbox vs. virtualbox-nonfree

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 2017-11-30 at 12:43 -0500, Bill wrote:
> Maybe it refers to a fee to use it?

No, virtualbox is always for free as in beer. IIRC even the non-OSE
(non-"open source edition") nowadays is open source, however, loosely
speaking the binary from Oracle isn't compiled against your distro's
libraries and usually works with less issues, than the OSE compiled
against shared libraries of your distro, it has got less dependencies
than the version from your distro. I suspect that Mint provides a
package with the binary from Oracle and another package with a binary
compiled against libraries of your distro's repositories. Another
difference might be, that your distro provides a package with kernel
modules for the distro's binary, while dkms likely needs to build the
modules for the binary from Oracle.