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, Bacula Project Leader
Hi! My name is David, and I have one question… Can I use the last version of free Bacula 9.6.x to use with Amazon S3 GLACIER? Thank you!!