+Kern;;;12 December 2013 at 21:21 CET
+Letter to the Community concerning Bareos
+
+ Letter to the Community
+ 12 December 2013
+
+DISCLAIMER:
+Please keep in mind that what I discuss here are my own personal
+thoughts and not those of Bacula Systems. Bacula Systems statements
+and positions will be communicated on the Bacula Systems web site or
+by other official Bacula Systems communications.
+
+I am obliged to write about Bareos. Many or most of the things that I
+will write are statements of facts, but certain are allegations that myself
+and Bacula Systems have made. In the case of the allegations, particularly
+the most serious, they are yet to be determined by a court of law.
+
+When I use the terms Bacula Systems or Bacula Enterprise Edition, I am
+referring to the code which is proprietary, and when I refer to
+Bacula, unless otherwise stated, I am referring to the fully open source
+community version.
+END DISCLAIMER.
+
+Since the whole story is a bit long, I will break it into smaller
+pieces as follows:
+
+1. General Background.
+
+2. The theft of proprietary software and unfair competition that
+ led to the Bacula Systems lawsuit against Bareos.
+
+3. The fork itself and what went wrong --
+ copyright violations, plagiarism, moral wrong doing, and attempts
+ to destroy Bacula and me personally through abusive language.
+
+4. The Future of Bacula
+
+
+====
+
+1. General Background.
+
+Most of you already know that I am a founder of two companies:
+Autodesk Inc, in 1982 and Bacula Systems SA in 2008. However,
+more importantly, I consider myself as a developer -- mostly in
+C/C++ of system applications. I took an early retirement in 1995,
+and since 1998, I have been a full time passionate open source
+developer. I started with the APCUPSD project then in 2000 started
+the Bacula project, which I released to SourceForge in April of
+2002. Since 2000 all my available time has been devoted to making
+Bacula the best open source backup program possible. In January, it
+will be 14 years that I have been working on it, and for the moment
+I see no end in sight.
+
+I created Bacula Systems in 2008 with 7 other founders to ensure the
+long term growth and success of Bacula the community version. The
+concept was to earn money to fund development by providing enterprises
+with support for Bacula as a much less expensive alternative to
+existing commercial software. Most of these founders were and are
+passionate open source fans, each invested their own money in Bacula
+Systems to fund development and today a number of them depend on
+salaries from Bacula Systems to live.
+
+
+Bacula Systems hasn't in the least diminished my or the other
+founder's dedication to open source software. It has just provided a
+means to ensure that Bacula evolves faster with a corporation behind
+it. The state of maturity of Bacula is like a dream come true for me.
+
+
+
+2. The theft of proprietary software and unfair competition that
+ led to the Bacula Systems lawsuit against Bareos.
+
+
+The arrival of Bareos early this year is like the worst nightmare I
+can imagine in a dream come true and has led to the lawsuit mentioned
+at the following link:
+
+http://www.baculasystems.com/blog/bacula-systems-sa-files-lawsuit-against-bareos-gmbh-co-kg
+
+Now that Bacula Systems has announced the lawsuit I can be more open
+about what has been going on.
+
+
+How and why have we gotten there?
+
+The basis of the problem is related to a community developer who began
+working with Bacula in 2008, and then as a consultant helped Bacula
+Systems in 2010 with the Solaris packaging. To work with the Solaris
+packaging, he requested access to the Bacula Enterprise software. To
+have this access, he signed an NDA, which is normal when you give a
+"consultant" access to proprietary software.
+
+This consultant did the Solaris packaging for Bacula Systems, then
+later continued developing the community version, all the while with
+access to the Enterprise code. He even had a SIP telephone that
+connected directly into the Bacula Systems corporate telephone system
+including the internal conference centers. He continued working on
+the community version where he was responsible for applying patches to
+the Bacula community version, since he had full write permission,
+while at the same time, he also helped port code from the Enterprise
+version into the community version.
+
+On the 27th of February 2013, I learned that Bareos had been created
+and that this consultant/developer was a managing director as well as
+CTO of Bareos, and that they had a competing commercial fork of Bacula
+that he had been working on since 2010.
+
+You can imagine my stupefaction since the consultant had never
+mentioned that he had created a commercial fork of Bacula to me or
+anyone in Bacula Systems, nor did Bacula Systems learn about this fork
+from the Bacula Systems partner DassIT, which apparently created
+Bareos and with which it shares their headquarters and the four
+managing directors. Furthermore until Bacula Systems removed his git
+access to our Enterprise source code, the consultant continued daily
+downloads of the Enterprise software it even after Bareos was up and
+running.
+
+Bacula Systems immediately wrote to the consultant requesting him to
+delete the Enterprise source code and stop using it, which in a rather
+emotional email, he refused to do.
+
+At that point, what would you do? We looked more carefully at the
+Bareos source code and determined that it included a few very
+important enterprise enhancements that were only in the Bacula
+Enterprise code. So, the only conclusion possible is that the
+consultant had taken pieces of the enterprise code and used them in
+the Bareos release. In addition, there were many serious copyright
+problems in the Bareos code that I will elaborate more later in this
+letter.
+
+Bacula Systems then took two approaches to resolving these problems.
+One was to make it clear that Bareos did not have the right to possess
+or use the Bacula Enterprise code, and the other was to request the
+Free Software Foundation Europe to resolve the copyright issues with
+Bareos. From my personal point of view, working with Bareos was very
+frustrating since they essentially put up every kind of obstacle
+possible including denying everything, which complicated and dragged
+out the discussions. In the end, both the Bareos lawyer and the
+consultant's lawyer wrote letters asserting that their clients claimed
+to have destroyed the Enterprise source or in the case of Bareos that
+they have never had it. This whole process took many months, and in
+August Bacula Systems believed that the problems with Bareos were
+mostly resolved.
+
+My next surprise was in late September. In a rather massive several
+thousand line commit, we found over four hundred lines of Bacula
+Enterprise code that were also buried in that commit. This code was
+very obviously copied directly from the Enterprise code and not simply
+written by the author of the commit, who is another of the managing
+directors of Bareos. This also meant that despite the fact that both
+the consultant and Bareos claimed to not have the Enterprise code,
+they did. This put a whole new dimension to the Bareos release,
+because there was clear new theft of Bacula Systems proprietary code
+despite Bareos' and the consultant's claims not to possess it. This
+was very serious as the code the consultant had contains a
+considerable amount of other Bacula Systems code that could also be
+copied and released to the public. At this point Bacula Systems had
+no choice but to file a lawsuit, which was prepared and filed on the
+6th of December 2013 in the Swiss Cantonal court.
+
+Given that it is clearly published on the Bareos web site that the
+Bareos code has been under development since 2010, one can only imagine
+that the whole affair was planned from the beginning and it appears
+that it is industrial espionage and software piracy that was planned
+and executed in secret for during two or three years.
+
+For me personally, it was a real deception since this consultant had
+stayed in my house, then myself and other colleagues from Bacula
+Systems had spent considerable time and effort working with the
+consultant helping him improve his programming and more particularly
+how to program within Bacula. It is even more painful to think that
+he did this secretly for apparently many years.
+
+What follows is my discussion of the fork and the copyright violations
+that do not form a part of the lawsuit, but are very important for
+the future of Bacula and more in general for the future of open
+source.
+
+3. The fork itself and what went wrong --
+ copyright violations, plagiarism, moral wrong doing, and attempts to
+ destroy Bacula and me personally through abusive language.
+
+As mentioned above, on the 27th of February, Bacula Systems and myself
+became aware of a fork called Bareos, so obviously, I was interested
+in what they were doing. Aside from the negative attitude they openly
+postulated toward Bacula on their web site (since removed), I was
+rather surprised by the copyright violations in the source code, that
+they describe on their web site as
+
+ "We had some minor formal issuse [sic] regarding version history
+ and header files at the beginning of our project".
+
+In fact the copyright violations consisted of the following items:
+
+1. In the original release, they added the Bareos copyright (as well as
+ others) to all the original Bacula files, including those that they had not
+ changed.
+
+2. They removed all the copyright on all the binaries and replaced them with
+ "Copyright (C) 2013-2013 Bareos GmbH & Co. KG"
+
+Both of these are serious copyright violations. Bareos' first attempt
+at fixing the violations was what I would call minimal and had to be
+redone later with far more significant changes.
+
+In addition to the copyright violations, there are still clear
+examples of plagiarism (in other terms copyright violations) that
+exist in their code that were added more recently. For example, the
+file bacula/src/stored/fd_cmds.c from the original Bacula source code
+was copied into sd_cmds.c and then modified to replace all references
+to the fd or File daemon by sd or Storage daemon respectively. This
+is normal, but what was not normal was despite probably 80-90% of the
+code remaining identical to the original including comments, they
+totally stripped the Free Software Foundation Europe copyright and
+replaced it with a Bareos copyright. This is probably one of the most
+common form of copyright violation, and it is very hard to detect
+without spending a large amount of time examining the code.
+
+In addition, they removed my name from the source code, which was
+
+ Kern Sibbald, MM
+
+and replaced it by:
+
+ Marco van Wieringen, November 2012
+
+This is clearly plagiarism, and it still exists in their source code
+today. As far as I can tell, there are several other such cases,
+where significant portions of an original Bacula file have been copied
+into a new file (or even the whole file taken and edited as in the
+case of sd_cmds.c). The result is a totally new file with the old
+copyright and accreditation removed. In my opinion, this practice is
+extremely serious for the future of open source and Bacula, because
+imagine carrying this a bit farther. If they continue this procedure
+on other files, one could imagine that in a few years after numerous
+releases and changes, the whole code body gets shuffled around, put in
+new files, and all the Free Software Foundation Europe's copyrights
+disappear. Then the source code can be taken proprietary, and Bareos
+could have their own proprietary copy of code that was previously open
+source. This is, of course, speculation but it is possible.
+
+Now I would like to discuss moral wrong doing. This is not a legal point
+because as far as I can tell these are not violations of the law, but
+they are in my opinion moral violations of standard practices particularly
+among open source programmers.
+
+The original Bacula source code header includes the following statement
+inside the copyright section:
+
+ "The main author of Bacula is Kern Sibbald, with contributions from
+ many others, a complete list can be found in the file AUTHORS."
+
+Although the AUTHORS file is in the Bareos release, they totally
+stripped all the references to it from the header files, thus
+effectively hiding the AUTHORS. I was rather surprised by this,
+because that eliminated the most important part of attributions to
+both myself and everyone else.
+
+To my surprise, under the GPL according to the Free Software
+Foundation, this is legal.
+
+They removed a number of other accreditations as well including the
+word Bacula from all the code.
+
+Removing accreditations in this way, to me seems rather brutal, and
+is something I feel is, at the least, morally wrong.
+
+
+Concerning the point about attempts to destroy Bacula and me
+personally through abusive language. I take two simple examples:
+
+Maik Aussendorf
+Fri 4 October 2013 15:30
+Presentation at Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC)
+
+ "Since a few years (uh) we have seen (that only uh) that features
+ were only (uh) developed in the closed source enterprise edition ...
+ and it (uh) even happened that (uh) patches that were submitted by
+ community developers were rejected by the project leader for the
+ reason (uh) that he said he wanted to have this feature only in the
+ enterprise version, which is (uh) not open source."
+
+My comments are:
+1. It is patently false that for a "few years (uh) ... (uh) that features
+ were only (uh) developed in the close source enterprise edition".
+ Bacula Systems has the right to develop code and has contributed a
+ lot of it back to Bacula and will continue to do so. Bacula
+ Systems' development takes nothing away from the community but adds
+ great value to it.
+
+2. To say that patches submitted by the community were rejected by me
+ (Kern) because they were enterprise features is a totally false.
+ This is a shameless, untrue personal attack that is designed to
+ discredit me as well as Bacula.
+
+3. Since Mr. Aussendorf has never worked with me or the Bacula
+ community, in the quote above, one can only assume that he is
+ repeating something that he heard from someone else, and either has
+ misunderstood the information or purposely has distorted it. In
+ any case, a person that makes statements of such importance without
+ first hand knowledge is not very credible.
+
+
+The second example is:
+Bruno Friedmann
+Email to Bacula-users 2 June 2013
+
+ "... 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."
+
+ It is very surprising that Bruno Friedmann who knows Bacula would
+ say that Bacula Systems has never "reversed" an Enterprise feature
+ back to the community since the Bacula manual clearly documents many
+ (but not all) of the features that Bacula Systems has contributed to
+ Bacula over the years or simply look at the long list of Bacula
+ Systems contributed fixes of the 20 February 2013 release on the
+ News section of the web site.
+
+I have a hard time understanding why people feel they have to publicly
+make such ridiculous remarks. I use a lot of open source software,
+and some of it is produced by open core companies that offer better
+and nicer commercial features that I would really like to have, but I
+don't have any sense that these companies are taking anything away
+from me or are in any way doing something wrong. On the contrary,
+most of them are fixing bugs and enhancing the community version.
+
+I guess this sort of verbal abuse is a sign of the times. Instead of
+trying to tear down years of work, why can't these people just be
+content with what has been given to them free.
+
+4. The Future of Bacula
+
+Obviously at this point, Bacula Systems does not know what the outcome
+of the lawsuit will be, but I hope that at a minimum it stops the
+theft of the Enterprise code, the copyright violations, and that it
+puts a stop to the public smear campaign against Bacula, myself, and
+Bacula Systems that the managing directors of Bareos have maintained
+for the last nine months.
+
+Although the Bacula project has been on hold since February while
+trying to sort out these issues, the future looks very bright since
+Bacula Systems has continued developing new features in the Enterprise
+version at an even faster pace, and since Bacula Systems feels that
+the differentiation between the community version and the Enterprise
+version is sufficient, you can expect over the next three to four
+months to see several things:
+
+1. An improved bacula.org web site with a new design sponsored by
+ Bacula Systems, and with the help of a long time community
+ supporter.
+
+2. More new features backported to the community version of Bacula.
+
+3. An annual Bacula Conference with the first one in Berlin starting
+ with a dinner the evening of 20 March and taking place on the 21st
+ of March.
+
+4. Long term continuation of Bacula through sponsorship by Bacula Systems
+ which has always contributed significant pieces of code that it
+ developed to the community version and will continue to do so.
+ This has always been our stated objective, but now it is more
+ formal since Bacula Systems has an agreement with the Free Software
+ Foundation Europe wherein it states that Bacula Systems will
+ contribute back to the community version all new features developed
+ by Bacula Systems after at most five years that are not encumbered
+ by third party proprietary agreement. The maximum delay of five
+ years is important to allow Bacula Systems to grow and thus
+ continue to contribute to the community version. Being an open
+ core company is not a new business strategy -- companies such as:
+ RedHat, MySQL, Zimbra, SugarCRM, Eucalyptus, Pentaho, and Carafe
+ (note, at one time I argued for RedHat as an open source company,
+ but I was arguing with a highly placed FSF person, who was probably
+ right). However, I don't think that any other open core company
+ has yet made such a strong open source commitment.
+
+I plan additional blogs on these subjects particularly as important
+events happen, but I hope this helps you understand what myself and
+Bacula have been through for the last nine months, and that my
+commitment remains as strong as ever to make Bacula the best open
+source backup program.
+
+Thank you for your understanding and for using Bacula.
+
+Kern Sibbald
+Bacula Project Manager
+
+;;;;
+