Re: [Bacula-users] Fwd: Thanks

Hello Web,

On 03/26/2014 02:07 AM, WebDawg wrote:

Kern,

I plan to move over to Bacula as soon as I get a chance and that last comment was not directed just at bacula. I was just unsure of any project related to bacula and did not want to get involved with stuff like this. By alternative I meant avoiding bacula all together. The response that I have gotten from this mailing list has been incredible considering what I wrote.

I understand that you don't want to be involved with stuff like this. I don't either, but it was forced on me. If you want to use Bacula you are welcome, and if you do use Bacula, I am sure that the Bacula users will treat you well. I am especially pleased to see how nicely our list deals with users -- I am not referring to Bareos here, but my experience has been that this is not always the case with some other projects.

Thanks for the heads up on bareos development. Being a recent discover of bacula it really does help considering I know very little about development of each and have never attended a talk about either. I may have sounded offended but I just get tired of the negative attitudes generated from stuff like this. Reminded me about disagreements with distros and such.

There are not many talks about Bacula, mainly because I am not able to travel very well, but that is going to change. Now that there is a nice group of Bacula Systems developers (my dream), if they are willing (and I think so), I am going to send them out to make presentations (or encourage them to do so).

One of the only reasons I brought it to the mailing list was because I think it is the wrong way to go especially with a new user. I mean, there I was, learning to use bareos effectively, asking questions to satisfy my curiosity and ended up finding out that bareos was the wrong way to go.

I was silent on Bareos for about 9 months, for the first 4 months, I thought we could resolve the copyright issues and that (alleged) fact that they had taken about 20 (very important) lines from Bacula Enterprise. After a lot of hassle they agreed, but then a couple months later another 400 lines of Bacula Enterprise code showed up in their Bareos release. This is after their lawyers had written 2-4 months previously that they no access to this code. In addition at that time one of the board members of Bareos started making presentations where he accused me of withholding community contributions saying that they were Enterprise features. This was and is really shocking to me. Never have I or would I even dream of withholding a community contribution for that reason. A lawsuit is not the right way to resolve the problem, but Bacula Systems had no choice least they see another 100K lines of their code go into Bareos. All this code will over time go into Bacula, but it should never be stolen.

In my view the only way to stop guys who behave unethically (and illegally) in open source is to simply boycott them. That is most likely what happened to you.

In my mind I thought, carry on, and install bacula at the first chance. In others minds I was to be shunned.

It is allright, and I get it, I just figure that instead of having the fight with the users, just take me at my word I would install bacula, and let this all play out between the people that matter. I can understand all the work that went into this software and from the blog posts it seems things went pretty bad between the two projects.

I just have never seen any project, organization, or entity succeed when it attacks its own users and considering, in reality, I will be a baccula user if I move forward with this solution, it just did not seem right.

It also worries me to read this off of the blog:

This is also true for Bacula Systems, but is not at all the case for Bareos, because it contains (alleged) stolen code from Bacula Systems, plagiarized code from Bacula, and also plagiarized code from elsewhere on the net, as well as code that was submitted to Bacula but simply put into Bareos without permission of the author. If you are using Bareos software, you might want to be sure you have some sort of indemnity or risk being surprised …

Yes, you should worry about that, but if you are not a large company or other institution, you have no reason to fear Bacula Systems providing you are not knowingly redistributing stolen code. However, consider the following: an employee of an ISP posted some quota code to the Bacula emailing list. Our programmers were not happy about the performance problems for large scale installations, so we worked with this person to improve the code which he did. Then at that point he went radio silent. I have been unable to get an FLA from the parent company for this code, so it has not gone into Bacula, but Bareos has this code. By the way, I have even gone to visit this company and sent a number of emails. No response on the subject of getting permission to use the code. So do you want to risk perhaps one day this particular company knocking on your door and asking you for royalties on the code they wrote? This is pretty unlikely if you are a "home" user but it could potentially happen if you are a commercial or institutional user.

I see now that you are talking about how the code was also copied from other sources but at first read it seems like Bacula is going to take action against the users of bareos.

It is very unlikely that Bacula will take action against Bareos users, but it is possible, particularly if suddenly more Bacula Enterprise code were released, but the action would probably be something that would ask them politely to switch to some software that doesn't have this problem Bacula or Bacula Enterprise or other commercial software. Neither myself nor Bacula Systems are interested in punishing innocent users.

In the end this all comes down to myself being ignorant of this, learning about it, saying I will fix it, but still being told to screw off. I know you guys can't control this, and I know IRC too. It just seemed like a bad attitude from an official project channel that is supposed to be an official stop for live support.

I think you should take it all with a grain of salt. There are always a range of reactions to everything, and I am sure if you become a Bacula user you will be well treated. If you remain a Bareos user (your right) please talk to the Bareos guys about your problems.

Best regards,
Kern

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