On 2 August Marco van Wieringen added a 486 line patch that changed 14 files (SHA e2f8f223…) to the Bareos public repository, which Bareos is permitted to do providing they respect the Bacula copyright. The disingenuous comment with the commit is: “Backport some obvious fixes for the core from Bacula 7“. These fixes are anything but obvious otherwise they would have been found long ago, and they indeed came from the Bacula 7.0.x source code. Bacula 7.0.0 and later versions has a AGPLv3 license which is incompatible with the Bareos AGPLv3 license. This new Bacula version 7.0.0 and later license contains the following additional term (among others):
3. Pursuant to AGPLv3, Section 7(b), the portions of the file AUTHORS that are deemed to be specified reasonable legal notices and/or author attributions shall be preserved in redistribution of source code and/or modifications thereof. Furthermore, when the following notice appears in a source code file, it must be preserved when source code is conveyed
and/or propagated:Copyright (C) 20xx-2014 Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
The main author of Bacula is Kern Sibbald, with contributions from many others, a complete list can be found in the file AUTHORS.
You may use this file and others of this release according to the license defined in the LICENSE file, which includes the Affero General Public License, v3.0 (“AGPLv3″) and some additional permissions and terms pursuant to its AGPLv3 Section 7.
Bacula® is a registered trademark of Kern Sibbald.
This clause is perfectly in line with open source principles, and is in no way intended to restrict the use of Bacula or parts of the Bacula software. However, it does make mandatory, what for me a fundamental part of open source, namely to keep the attributions in addition to the copyright. When Bareos was first released in February 2013, they stripped the attributions from the headers of each file. We (myself and FSFE) requested that they put those attributions back, but they obstinately refused citing that they were not required by copyright law, which is probably true (I am not a lawyer so I cannot really judge). The Bacula 7.0.0 license makes it clear that use of conveyance of Bacula copyrighted code requires keeping the attributions.
This provision of the Bacula LICENSE was not respected by Bareos because for those 14 files where Mr. van Wieringen copied the Bacula source, he did not respect the requirement to keep the full copy of the copyright statement including the attributions that is present at the top of the original Bacula file.
Perhaps Bareos and in particular Mr. van Wieringen were not aware of the change of the Bacula license, but they have nevertheless conveyed Bacula source code in a way that once again violates the Bacula FSFE copyright.
To correct their copyright violation, they must include the full Bacula FSFE copyright headers as they are in version 7.0.0 in each where they include these changes.
