Hello,
I think that everyone might be interested in my response to a
private email.
In sending me a signed FLA, a user sent this comment:
My opinion is almost the same as (name removed) though;
I never even heard of Bareos until this lawsuit came up. Not
putting anything in the git repositories for a year, then removing
Windows support from the code and staying silent while the
commercial version was progressing has not surely contributed to
the "free" appearance of Bacula.
That said, I'm really happy development has continued. And for
Bareos, the only thing I still hear about it is your mails in the
mailing list; so I'm not even sure about its health.
I understand this fully and don't take it as a criticism. My goal in
writing about the lawsuit was not to hide the fact that there is a
fork of Bacula (there are actually two -- see the Bacula Wikipedia
for more info), but rather to point out that not all open source
projects follow the same rules of ethics and requirements for
Copyright Assignment Agreements that I use. Note the Copyright
Assignment was formerly called FLA, but I have changed the name to
avoid confusion with the FLA issued by the FSFE) that I use. Also,
since Bacula Systems is and has been the largest single contributor
to the Bacula project since 2008 (exactly what I wanted),
information about this lawsuit is obviously very important to
community members.
Concerning putting nothing into the git repository for a year: that
is true and unfortunate. A good part of that time was that I wanted
to understand more about the fork as well as implement the most
important new features that they had developed over a 3 year period
(according to them -- from 2010 to 2013). I also remained silent
concerning Bareos from February 2013 when their fork was announced
until late November 2013, and the only reason I responded at that
time, was that the Bareos team had been trotting around various
conferences in Europe repeating what I consider to be very
misleading and incorrect information about the Bacula project. I
guess it took me some time to digest all that, and to a very small
extent, I am still digesting it. I am not offering this as an excuse
but merely as an explanation of what happened, and I accept all such
comments or criticisms.
Concerning the removing of Windows support: Building the Windows
version has always been rather complicated, and the community
version has lagged quite a lot behind the Enterprise version. Since
Bacula Systems is not yet ready to release the source changes to
competitors and I could no longer find the time to build and support
two version, Bacula Systems made their binaries available at a very
reasonable price. I am working on a longer term more satisfactory
solution that I had hoped to release early this year, but it will be
delayed until June.
Concerning the second paragraph: yes, development is still
continuing at an even faster pace, and the fruits of it will show up
in the next release that I am planning for June of this year.
Concerning Bareos: given that I haven't seen any major development
in the last year and that the buzz around Bareos seems to be nil, I
suppose I might do better to stop writing about them :-)
I assure that the community version of Bacula is 100% free, and it
will remain so, and because the licensing is carefully controlled
you can be sure in using it that you will not have any surprises,
which is not the case with all cloned software.
Had the Bareos fork been a normal open source fork without
hostilities and without alleged unauthorized public releasing of
proprietary software, the issues mentioned would probably never
would have happened, and we all could have benefited from new ideas
and faster evolution of open source backup software.
Thank you for the comments, as it helps me better understand how
users perceive the Bacula project.
Best regards,
Kern
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