Dear Bacula community, I would like to present and get some feedback
from you about a new project called bareos [1]

I discovered it 6 months ago, after starting to be more and more annoyed
by the way the bacula's community edition was driven and developed. Even if I 
was using it since version 1.32 ...

First of all, I wish to be clear and shout out my respect to all the
work done by Kern on Bacula or any other contributor. We have a really
nice working software. But it's stalled ...

My personal frustration started with the creation of Bacula Enterprise,
which has until now never (from what I've seen) reversed an Enterprise
feature back to the community. Which in my sense would have been a clear
statement & commitment from the Bacula Enterprise to the community. A
Free Software is free once it has been paid once. And more the time
pass, more the community edition look like abandoned (windows client
binary, bweb, ...) Okay I can understand the enterprise's edition
arguments, the point is not there according to me.

So at the end of last year, I've started looking what else could replace
Bacula for my own usage, and the small/medium customers I serve.
Digging on github (my favorite source forge) I discovered bareos project.

Basically Bareos is a fork of bacula community edition. With active
contribution, and look like what I was looking for.

Bareos is a compatible (at the time of writing) drop'in replacement
which offers a bunch of nice feature I was waiting for.
Especially high quality windows clients.
Ok I was disappointed about the fact it was a fork, but their website
explains the why for those who wish to know.

I've then started to use it (easy to try with the number of supported
platforms) and ready to use package. (Thanks to open build service [2])
Some installations were kept in a compatible way, other in native bareos
way. The transition was really easy for anybody knowing how bacula works.

After 3 months of production, including full restore, virtual machine
backup, etc, I qualified it to be really production ready.

Hey the base code and the way patches have been handled certainly
explain those results.

I also appreciate the effort to make bareos almost ready to use after
installation. Trying to reduce the entry level ticket.

The remaining concerns I've found:
- The community behind will have to grow and success in a truly
transparent way.

- Get new contributors (challenge is the same for bacula, but forking
and propose request merge on github is really more cool than email patches)

- Will the main actors realize the plan to be sustainable with the
business plan and thus continue to produce quality community software?
- The full remake of the documentation.
- Get a perfect web bconsole

So did some of you already test it?
What's your own feedback, your thoughts about it?

Regards.

[1] http://www.bareos.org
[2] http://openbuildservice.org

-- 

Bruno Friedmann
 
GPG KEY : D5C9B751C4653227
irc: tigerfoot

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Get 100% visibility into Java/.NET code with AppDynamics Lite
It's a free troubleshooting tool designed for production
Get down to code-level detail for bottlenecks, with <2% overhead.
Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_ap2
_______________________________________________
Bacula-users mailing list
Bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users