I
doubt my opinion holds much weight either way but if you want my
opinion here it is;
As
anyone would expect both sides say the other one is lying about many
things. I can only assume, at this point, the truth lies
somewhere in between.
With
that said I think this lawsuit only hurts Bacula. I never even heard
of Bareos until this lawsuit came up. Then I started reading about it
all over the place. Including a bunch of nonsense out of the Bacula
camp like, “If you use Baroes software, Bacula will sue you” and
“Braching is bad for open source”. All that really put a bad
taste in my mouth about Bacula, especially because I could Identify
with things the Bareos camp was saying like, “Bacula isn't updating
the open source project” which was certainly true. Along with the
fact that I find this whole open core model to be distasteful and
anit-opensource in general. No Windows client binaries available
without paying Bacula Systems for them for how long?
Most
of this has no real baring on the cases merit But I think everything
that has happened has hurt Bacula's reputation significantly and will
likely hurt the project more than it will help the project if the
lawsuit is successful. If the lawsuit fails then Bacula looks even
worse. Also, while this lawsuit is carrying on, it only spotlights
the fact that there isn't a really good open source competitor which
will undoubtedly kick start numerous projects. (Not sure that is a
bad thing but it is definitely bad for Bacula Systems)
I
think if Bacula would have moved on and just focused on making a
better product and selling services they would have continued to be
the de facto standard backup solution on Linux for a long time.
That
is my humble opinion. I truly wish you the best and I certainly do
not condone the stealing of code.
Ben