On Sunday 26 April 2009 20:01:28 Simon Holm Thøgersen wrote: > Attempting to cross-compile Bacula for Windows I ran into the need for > the VSS headers. I could download them from Microsoft, but it would be > much more convenient for everyone if they were part of the Bacula > source. > > I'd like to do the work required to make this possible, if somebody > could outline a method that would make it eligible for distribution with > Bacula. Any ideas? > >
Well, the microsoft VSS headers and a few source files cannot be redistributed. This is pointed out in our LICENSE agreement. They can be downloaded, compiled and the resulting binaries may be distributed with the code in them. Thus for the moment, there is no way we can release them. One of the problems is that we are running on a very old version of the VSS code, but which still works perfectly fine. One thing I have always wanted to do, but we just have never found time for it, is to rewrite the code from scratch ourselves -- much like mingw is written, then they could be freely distributed. In fact, certain of the header files seem to be already available on the net, but without any copyright. If someone such as yourself could make an Open Source version of the Microsoft VSS interface code that we use, we would be very happy to take it. However, not ever having done such a thing, I think it would be necessary to research how to do it in a way that one would not violate their copyright. In otherwords, you cannot just take their code and rewrite it, nor (to the best of my knowledge) look at their code and then write it in a different manner as both of those would possibly be a copyright violation. Perhaps the mingw or the cygwin project could be some help in pointing out appropriate techniques ... With the new EU directive that forced Microsoft to open their specs to the CFIS code, the same directives might apply to VSS as well, or in any case, perhaps Microsoft no longer considers it proprietary and would be willing to make their license a bit less restrictive. Anyway, if you have a desire to resolve this, we are very interested. Best regards, Kern ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Crystal Reports - New Free Runtime and 30 Day Trial Check out the new simplified licensign option that enables unlimited royalty-free distribution of the report engine for externally facing server and web deployment. http://p.sf.net/sfu/businessobjects _______________________________________________ Bacula-devel mailing list Bacula-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-devel
