DISCLAIMER: This post discusses Bareos’ copyright violations, and neither myself nor Bacula Systems had any direct input to Bareos about the copyright violations. Since the Bacula copyright is held by the Free Software Foundation Europe, the FSFE worked directly with Bareos. As the project manager, I provided the FSFE with my opinions and more importantly the technical aspects of the violations (which files, what was done, …). I was not party to any of the discussions the FSFE had with Bareos. The views presented below are my own.
END DISCLAIMER
This post is the original research on the Bareos fork of the Bacula project that I did sometime in March or April of 2013. Since writing it, three things have happened: 1. They corrected most of the violations noted. 2. They publicly posted on their web site that:
The founder of the Bacula project Kern Sibbald claims that there are copyright infringements in Bareos code in a mail on the bacula-users mailing list dating 2013-11-25.
This is simply not true.
I still claim that on 26 December 2013 the Bareos code has continuing plagiarism and copyright violations. To see an analysis of what is still in their code as of the date of the following post, please see:
http://blog.bacula.org/bareos-plagiarism/
3. and finally Bareos also claims on their site that:
We had some minor formal issuse [sic] regarding version history and header files at the beginning of our project
These were, in my opinion, much more than minor formal issues. Below, you will see my initial analysis of the original Bareos source code prior to the corrections they applied. I leave it to you to decide how important they were:
Background:
===========
There are five main problems that Bareos has introduced in taking, modifying, and redistributing the Bacula community source code.
1. They have not followed the AGPLv3 license section 5.a: “The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it (the source code), and giving a relevant date.”
Instead they have removed all the past change history of Bacula as contained in the public git repository and recommitted all their code with numerous changes to the Bacula code the 28 January 2013 with the author listed as Marco van Wieringen in the git repository.
2. Section 4 or the AGPLv3 states: “You may convey verbatim copies of the Program’s source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.”
The key point is that they must “keep int tact all notices …” Instead they have removed all the original Free Software License notifications and replaced them with a modified version of the original plus their own copyright. In the original release they added the Bareos copyright to all the original files, even those not changed. Since then they have removed some of their copyrights on unchanged files, but they have left a modified version of our original copyright. There still remain many files where they have added their copyright but have made no significant original contribution to the file.
Example src/win32/filed/res.h they only deleted one old SVN tag.
3. They have removed all attributions in the original copyright and in certain files (the bat about box), where
by Dirk H Bartley and Kern Sibbald
has been removed.
4. They have systematically replaced all references to Bacula except in a few copyright notices with the word Bareos, which has led to items like the following in src/console/conio.c
Updated for Bareos, Kern Sibbald, December MMIII
I have certainly never updated any file for Bareos, and Bareos did not even exist in 2003.
5. They have not followed the AGPLv3 section 5.d. “If the work has interactive user interfaces, Appropriate Legal Notices; however, if the Program has interactive interfaces that do not display Appropriate Legal Notices, your work need not make them do so.”
Instead, they have changed the copyright on all the binaries that have interactive displays (usually the -? option) from:
Copyright (C) xxxx-2013 Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
to
Copyright (C) 2013-2013 Bareos GmbH & Co. KG
To be clear, the original copyright has been removed.
In Windows FD they changed:
Copyright 2012 Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
to
See LICENSE File
To be clear most binaries no longer have any FSFE copyright.
Problem:
========
The changes that they have made are massive. The patch to fix the problems they have created is minimal and not sufficient. It would be very difficult and time-consuming to come up with a definitive list of all the files that have been improperly modified if nothing other than the fact that there are well over 800 files and many hundreds of thousands of lines of code. They are the ones that have clearly created a license problem, so the onus should be on them to fix it, not us to try to find every violation in the massive changes they have
made.
Suggested way to correct the situation:
=======================================
The only way I can see to correct all the problems cited above with the minimal effort on their part would be to go back to the point when they originally started changing the Bacula source code (according to their web site that is 2010 but I suspect that they started in 2009), make a copy of the Bacula source code at that point, put it into a new repository, then apply every change that they have made keep the git log and the author information on all commits intact.
The rules for modifying the source code should be as follows:
1. Leave all original copyright notices intact, including those on binaries.
2. Add their copyright notices only on files they create or where they have made a significant original contribution.
3. Do not remove any attributions in the source code.
4. Keeping in mind rule #1, if they remove the name Bacula from the source code do so only where it makes sense. See my point 4 above for an example of where it does not make sense.
5. Ensure that the authors of all changes/patches made to the source code are clearly noted in the git commit log as is the open source convention. This should include all current and future patches that they pull from the Bacula source code.
====
Now, why have I brought this up if most or all the problems have been fixed? This is mainly because they keep denying that there are still copyright violations (as I noted above see my other blog on this); and they keep saying that the original violations were only “minor formal issues”; and because they did not follow the above rules; and because the attributions and references to the AUTHORS files was removed; and finally because the totality of the original git history was removed and restarted as a big new import to a new Bareos git repository under the name of their principal programmer.
It is now documented for historical reasons, and I will let you be the judge.
