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Hello Web,
On 03/26/2014 02:07 AM, WebDawg wrote: I understand that you don't want to be involved with stuff like this. I don't either, but it was forced on me. If you want to use Bacula you are welcome, and if you do use Bacula, I am sure that the Bacula users will treat you well. I am especially pleased to see how nicely our list deals with users -- I am not referring to Bareos here, but my experience has been that this is not always the case with some other projects. There are not many talks about Bacula, mainly because I am not able to travel very well, but that is going to change. Now that there is a nice group of Bacula Systems developers (my dream), if they are willing (and I think so), I am going to send them out to make presentations (or encourage them to do so).
I was silent on Bareos for about 9 months, for the first 4 months, I thought we could resolve the copyright issues and that (alleged) fact that they had taken about 20 (very important) lines from Bacula Enterprise. After a lot of hassle they agreed, but then a couple months later another 400 lines of Bacula Enterprise code showed up in their Bareos release. This is after their lawyers had written 2-4 months previously that they no access to this code. In addition at that time one of the board members of Bareos started making presentations where he accused me of withholding community contributions saying that they were Enterprise features. This was and is really shocking to me. Never have I or would I even dream of withholding a community contribution for that reason. A lawsuit is not the right way to resolve the problem, but Bacula Systems had no choice least they see another 100K lines of their code go into Bareos. All this code will over time go into Bacula, but it should never be stolen. In my view the only way to stop guys who behave unethically (and illegally) in open source is to simply boycott them. That is most likely what happened to you.
Yes, you should worry about that, but if you are not a large company or other institution, you have no reason to fear Bacula Systems providing you are not knowingly redistributing stolen code. However, consider the following: an employee of an ISP posted some quota code to the Bacula emailing list. Our programmers were not happy about the performance problems for large scale installations, so we worked with this person to improve the code which he did. Then at that point he went radio silent. I have been unable to get an FLA from the parent company for this code, so it has not gone into Bacula, but Bareos has this code. By the way, I have even gone to visit this company and sent a number of emails. No response on the subject of getting permission to use the code. So do you want to risk perhaps one day this particular company knocking on your door and asking you for royalties on the code they wrote? This is pretty unlikely if you are a "home" user but it could potentially happen if you are a commercial or institutional user. It is very unlikely that Bacula will take action against Bareos users, but it is possible, particularly if suddenly more Bacula Enterprise code were released, but the action would probably be something that would ask them politely to switch to some software that doesn't have this problem Bacula or Bacula Enterprise or other commercial software. Neither myself nor Bacula Systems are interested in punishing innocent users.
I think you should take it all with a grain of salt. There are always a range of reactions to everything, and I am sure if you become a Bacula user you will be well treated. If you remain a Bareos user (your right) please talk to the Bareos guys about your problems. Best regards, Kern |
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