Dear Members of the Bacula Community,
I’m pleased to announce the creation of Bacula Systems S.A., a new company to
provide professional support and service for Bacula. I believe you will be
pleased to see how we have married a strong commitment to the ethos of honest
open source software with the availability of services desired by a wide
range of Bacula users.
As many of you know, I began work on Bacula in 2000 and released the first
public version in April 2002 to Source Forge. Although I have personally
written a very substantial part of the code, I offer sincere thanks to the
many members of the community who have provided ideas, fixes, testing, and
contributions of code, without which Bacula would not be what it is today.
It has been a labor of love and I am pleased that so many people have found
Bacula useful.
Before telling you more about Bacula Systems, let me reiterate my unfaltering,
ongoing commitment to open source software and the Bacula open source
project. The code for Bacula and all future releases will remain available as
free open source software under the GPL license that I transferred to the
protection of the Free Software Foundation of Europe. Unlike some other open
source projects, there will be no separate “enterprise” or proprietary
version of the Bacula source code. www.bacula.org will continue to be the
home for Bacula project development.
So, why create Bacula Systems? The company was created to respond to requests
from users who want professional support with guaranteed levels of service
and response times. To ensure continuity and the highest level of knowledge
transfer, I will take the position of Chairman of the Board and Chief
Technical Officer of Bacula Systems S.A..
Several members of the Bacula community have joined me to start the company.
The other team members are also strongly dedicated to the spirit of keeping
Bacula open and free while simultaneously offering commercial services to
those for whom it is essential in making the decision to deploy Bacula.
Bacula Systems is self-financed – the initial capital comes from the
founders; no outside venture capital was sought or accepted. This means we
have the power to establish the company’s priorities and we can remain
dedicated to “honest open source”. Bacula Systems S.A. is a Swiss company
with offices in Yverdon-les-Bains, and with branches in France and Germany
initially. We will open additional branches as business requires.
I will continue to support development of Bacula via bacula.org and the Bacula
community. Future developments will be in the “community” code base which
will remain free. Bacula Systems will offer “funded development” to
customers who wish to accelerate the addition of certain features to Bacula.
Code developed this way will be contributed to the free distribution and will
be available to the entire community at no charge. Bacula Systems will
provide additional fee-based services, including high quality consulting,
training, documentation and certified binaries.
Our goal in establishing Bacula Systems is to be inclusive of the community,
and expand it by creating opportunities for members of the Bacula community
through a well-defined Partner Program. If you provide IT services or
consulting, the Bacula Systems Partner Program can provide you with the
additional back-up (pardon the pun) support you need to serve your customers
more effectively.
Our plan is to develop an international network of partners who offer high
value added services to Bacula users – installing, configuring and optimizing
Bacula for their customers, as well as Level 3 and 4 support, with guaranteed
service levels. We will also provide training and tools to our partners.
The Bacula project website, www.bacula.org, and Source Forge will be unchanged
in the mission and ideals of being free sources of information, mail lists
and forum-based support for and by the community. Both Bacula source code and
Bacula binaries will continue to be available for free, as in the past, and
new releases will also be available for free. The new commercial website,
www.baculasystems.com will provide information on commercial subscriptions
for those users who want guaranteed levels of service, support, documentation
and certified binaries.
All members of the Bacula community are encouraged to register for free at
www.baculasystems.com, so that you will receive announcements and news about
our commercial activities, and so that you can send feedback to our new
company, Bacula Systems.
Thank you for your interest and participation in the Bacula community.
Sincerely,
Kern Sibbald
Bacula Project Leader
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