Hello

Recently Zak Greant wrote that he had been helping Bacula Systems out for the 
last couple of months on our community support and Free Software/Open Source 
strategy and relations.  In addition, he indicated that he had started a 
Bacula Twitter account that he thought should be run by the community.

This lead to a number of negative comments, some of the character that I would 
appreciate not seeing on the Bacula lists, and some welcome level headed 
support from Dan Langille.

My comments are the following:

- Zak made an announcement on the bacula-devel list, which is perfectly fine 
with me. If you wish to discuss it, please move the thread to the 
bacula-users list.  The development list is for development issues and we 
have enough of those to deal with already.  This work is very important 
because I want (and insist) that Bacula Systems must be a positive thing for 
the Community and not something that takes away from the Bacula Community.

- I didn't know before Zak had created this Twitter account before his 
announcement, and some of you may not like the idea.  Although it is unlikely 
I will use Twitter, I think creating it is a good thing for the Bacula 
Community.  If you like things like Twitter, please use it; if not, what harm 
does it do?

- In some of the responses to Zak's announcement there were comments about 
messages about the commercial part of Bacula on our lists and apparently some 
people have not heard about Bacula Systems.  Personally, I thought that 
everyone has heard about Bacula Systems.  I have discussed it in a good 
number of my Bacula Status reports for about 2 years now. Many years ago, I 
found it was nearly impossible for the Bacula project to deal with companies 
that want funded development or support.  It is for that reason that I 
created Bacula Systems.  From my stand point, Bacula Systems is the 
Enterprise support arm of Bacula.  The fact that Bacula Systems has the word 
Bacula in it means that the project and the company are closely related.  
Bacula Systems has already brought significant benefit to the project -- see 
my version 3.0.0 announcement.

- You will be hearing a lot more about Bacula Systems in the future, because 
it is (IMO) and important driving force for Bacula.  Bacula Systems is one of 
the few truly Open Source companies that exist, because *all* the software 
that it develops for Bacula is available to the community.  The Bacula 
Enterprise version has *less* features than the community version, not more 
as is the case with most commercial efforts started around a project.  The 
only other commercial software company that I know of that is fully Open 
Source is RedHat (and probably Canonical).  Most of the others are Open Core, 
which means that a small core part of the code is open, and the rest is 
proprietary.  We do not intend to do buisness that way.

- I said that you will hear more about Bacula Systems, but the communications 
should be directed toward offloading many tasks that normally should fall on 
me (and are often not done) such as starting a Twitter, creating a news 
letter, announcing training, organizing meetings ...  all things that are 
appropriate for helping the Community grow.  If anyone finds offending 
commercial messages in those communications, please let me know personally, 
and I will examine it and take appropriate action.  The Bacula projects lists 
are not meant to carry commercial messages.  I've made that very clear to 
Bacula Systems, and they understand.

- Finally, I would like to say that there are a surprising number of 
commercial efforts using Bacula, e.g. it is contained in at least two backup 
appliances. Most of these commercial companies have modified the code and 
distributed it, but not given back one line of code (not true for all cases).  
Bacula Systems has now given the project many thousands of lines of code, and 
I would like to see *all* commercial companies do the same. 

- On the community side, I am very pleased to have had so many contributions 
over the years, and they seem to be increasing -- thanks.

Best regards,

Kern

PS: I repeat. Please take lengthy discussions of things such as Zak's 
announcement off the developer's list -- thanks.

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