Letter to ADMIN

Article from ADMIN 19/2014

By ADMIN Magazine

Recently you published an article "Free Enterprise Backup with Bareos," written by Jörg Steffens and Philipp Storz. The problem with this article is that I personally find the second half of the following sentence slanderous and patently false:

"In 2010, long-standing Bacula developer Marco van Wieringen thus started to maintain enhancements and code cleanups that either were not accepted or were only proposed for integration into the commercial version in a separate Git repository."

First, the authors are repeating hearsay from a third party and not reporting something that they were involved with. This is clear from the wording of the sentence. It is also clear from the fact that neither of the authors ever worked on the Bacula project and neither had any knowledge of what changes were going into the "commercial" version other than hearsay.

Secondly, this clearly states that the Bacula project manager refused contributions for the open source version but nevertheless "proposed them for integration into the commercial version." This is false. Mr. van Wieringen had full write permission on the Bacula community git repository and was generally responsible for integrating community contributions. He could freely commit anything.

Yes, the Bacula project has either refused, or more often requested changes to, submitted patches for the community version, but these are based on a number of carefully chosen criteria that I can clearly state if requested that guarantee the consistency and quality of the Bacula code.

To state it very clearly: neither myself nor anyone else have ever rejected a community contribution and subsequently put it into the "commercial" version. This is something I would never even consider doing, and to say otherwise is a significant injury to my ethics and honor.

What these authors fail to explicitly mention is that Mr. van Wieringen had access to the Bacula

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