+Kern;;;12 October 2008 at 10:30am
+Creation of Bacula Systems SA
+Dear Members of the Bacula Community,
+
+I'm pleased to announce the creation of Bacula Systems S.A., a new company to
+provide professional support and service for Bacula. I believe you will be
+pleased to see how we have married a strong commitment to the ethos of honest
+open source software with the availability of services desired by a wide
+range of Bacula users.
+
+As many of you know, I began work on Bacula in 2000 and released the first
+public version in April 2002 to Source Forge. Although I have personally
+written a very substantial part of the code, I offer sincere thanks to the
+many members of the community who have provided ideas, fixes, testing, and
+contributions of code, without which Bacula would not be what it is today.
+It has been a labor of love and I am pleased that so many people have found
+Bacula useful.
+
+Before telling you more about Bacula Systems, let me reiterate my unfaltering,
+ongoing commitment to open source software and the Bacula open source
+project. The code for Bacula and all future releases will remain available as
+free open source software under the GPL license that I transferred to the
+protection of the Free Software Foundation of Europe. Unlike some other open
+source projects, there will be no separate "enterprise" or proprietary
+version of the Bacula source code. www.bacula.org will continue to be the
+home for Bacula project development.
+
+So, why create Bacula Systems? The company was created to respond to requests
+from users who want professional support with guaranteed levels of service
+and response times. To ensure continuity and the highest level of knowledge
+transfer, I will take the position of Chairman of the Board and Chief
+Technical Officer of Bacula Systems S.A..
+
+Several members of the Bacula community have joined me to start the company.
+The other team members are also strongly dedicated to the spirit of keeping
+Bacula open and free while simultaneously offering commercial services to
+those for whom it is essential in making the decision to deploy Bacula.
+Bacula Systems is self-financed -- the initial capital comes from the
+founders; no outside venture capital was sought or accepted. This means we
+have the power to establish the company's priorities and we can remain
+dedicated to "honest open source". Bacula Systems S.A. is a Swiss company
+with offices in Yverdon-les-Bains, and with branches in France and Germany
+initially. We will open additional branches as business requires.
+
+I will continue to support development of Bacula via bacula.org and the Bacula
+community. Future developments will be in the "community" code base which
+will remain free. Bacula Systems will offer "funded development" to
+customers who wish to accelerate the addition of certain features to Bacula.
+Code developed this way will be contributed to the free distribution and will
+be available to the entire community at no charge. Bacula Systems will
+provide additional fee-based services, including high quality consulting,
+training, documentation and certified binaries.
+
+Our goal in establishing Bacula Systems is to be inclusive of the community,
+and expand it by creating opportunities for members of the Bacula community
+through a well-defined Partner Program. If you provide IT services or
+consulting, the Bacula Systems Partner Program can provide you with the
+additional back-up (pardon the pun) support you need to serve your customers
+more effectively.
+
+Our plan is to develop an international network of partners who offer high
+value added services to Bacula users -- installing, configuring and optimizing
+Bacula for their customers, as well as Level 3 and 4 support, with guaranteed
+service levels. We will also provide training and tools to our partners.
+
+The Bacula project website, www.bacula.org, and Source Forge will be unchanged
+in the mission and ideals of being free sources of information, mail lists
+and forum-based support for and by the community. Both Bacula source code and
+Bacula binaries will continue to be available for free, as in the past, and
+new releases will also be available for free. The new commercial website,
+www.baculasystems.com will provide information on commercial subscriptions
+for those users who want guaranteed levels of service, support, documentation
+and certified binaries.
+
+All members of the Bacula community are encouraged to register for free at
+www.baculasystems.com, so that you will receive announcements and news about
+our commercial activities, and so that you can send feedback to our new
+company, Bacula Systems.
+
+Thank you for your interest and participation in the Bacula community.
+
+Sincerely,
+
+Kern Sibbald
+;;;
+
Kern;;;11 October 2008 at 11:30am
Bacula version 2.4.3 Released
This is to let you know that the source tar files and the Win32 binaries for
projects / bacula / docs / blobdiff