Hello, On 1 Jan 2011, I sent a Bacula Status report with a request for your feedback by filling out a survey.
For those of you who have responded: many thanks. For those of you who have not responded, the survey will remain open until the end of the month, and it gives you a good opportunity to communicate directly with me about some important topics. To fill out the survey, just go to the following link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5CXJ7S3 The survey allow you to enter virtually any text you want to make your comments, and it is all completely anonymous. I thought you might like a bit of feedback on the results so far (more after the survey is complete). 1. I was surprised how many of you appreciate the need for commercial support by Bacula Systems. No one (so far) has responded that Bacula Systems is not at all important to the project. 2. I have purposely refrained from discussing Bacula Systems too much on this list, because this is a community list, and I would not like to bother you about the commercial aspects of Bacula. However, I did receive a few comments such as the following one: I realise that Bacula Systems is a necessary evil but at times I feel that 3rd party contibutors may be put off because lots of planing seems to be done by Bacula systems. In practice I don't think there is a problem but just lurking on the -devel list makes it sound like that. or others that said that they wanted to know what exactly is in the Enterprise edition compared to the Community version. At least one person believes that the Bacula Systems plans are secret. Answer: Yes, I can understand those concerns. Bacula Systems plans are not secret, it is just that I haven't announced them on this list. We openly discussed them in the Bacula Developer's conference and will do so in the next conference as well. Since most people seem to want to hear more about Bacula Systems, I will begin including something on it in the next status report (generally quarterly). 3. One person requested that we stop putting features in the Enterprise version that are not in the Community version. Answer: As of the current Enterprise release (4.0.4) there are NO features in the Enterprise release that are not in the Community release (this will change over time, see below...). Our initial concept was to have full open source and to make the source of the Enterprise available to everyone. Unfortunately, with that fully open source strategy the first two years of Bacula Systems generated losses. We have realized that we must differentiate the Enterprise version and the Community version. Most Open Source companies do this by becoming Open Core companies. That is they have a free Community version and a proprietary commercial version with more features. Our new strategy is to remain fully Open Source, but to differentiate, as other companies do, what is Enterprise and what is Community. Thus, a certain part of the new development that Bacula Systems undertakes will be Open Source for the Community version and another part will be Open Source for the Enterprise version. This strategy seems to be working. In many ways, we differentiate like Open Core companies, but remain full Open Source. To complete the answer, today, Bacula Systems is putting some new features into the Enterprise version (mostly plugins) that will not immediately be available in the Community. Those new plugins (Windows related) are currently in beta test, and most of such features (such as Oracle plugins, SAP plugins, NDMP, ...) are high end features needed by companies but not very useful to most community members. All bugs that we fix are fixed in both the Community and the Enterprise versions, and I expect that over time many of the Enterprise features will become available in the Community version. For now I'll stop there, but there are many other interesting subjects. I do encourage you to fill out the survey, because it is an excellent way to let us know what you are thinking. http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5CXJ7S3 Best regards, Kern ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Special Offer-- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE (a $49 USD value)! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! Download using promo code Free_Logger_4_Dev2Dev. Offer expires February 28th, so secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsight-sfd2d _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
