Hello, This status report will discuss the following five points.
1. Please encourage Landon to implement data encryption by contributing. 2. Bacula Foundation 3. Bacula Funding Idea 4. Bacula 1.38 release status 5. Future Bacula development 1. Please help encourage Landon Fuller implement data encryption by contributing to EFF. If you haven't seen the announcement about this, please visit: http://www.bacula.org/?page=news For those of you who have contributed to this already -- many thanks :-) 2. I've looked into the idea of creating a Bacula Foundation, and if done here in Switzerland where I live, it will cost about $2000-3000 to create and $2000-3000 per year for administrative fees (accounting, audit, ...) to run. At this point, this is not feasible. I've also thought about including Bacula under a larger Foundation such as Apache, but Bacula does not yet meet their Incubator requirements. So for the near future a Bacula Foundation does not seem possible. 3. Open Source Funding Idea. I have been mulling over a funding idea for Open Source projects. If implemented for Bacula it could help pay for some of the costs: Windows licenses, hardware, Internet connection. Since beginning this project 5 1/2 years ago, I have personally "invested" about $40,000 in it. I'm not complaining about this as it is something I wanted to do and enjoyed doing. That money is spent and I have never had the least thought of trying to recover it. However, for the future I feel Bacula is mature enough that it should start paying its own way. If you want to read about my idea, please visit: http://www.bacula.org/OpenSourceFunding.html Your comments are welcome. Unless I hear overwhelming complaints about the idea, it is likely I will put it into effect beginning with version 1.38. Corporations, please take note. This affects you the most. By the way, any contribution to Landon's project will be fully taken in to consideration if my funding idea is implemented. 4. Bacula release status: I grossly underestimated the complexity of implementing multiple drive autochanger support, so the development version (currently 1.37.36) is not yet ready. It will most likely be about another month before it can be released (another week or two of fixes and at least two weeks of running without any major bugs). I mentioned this in the beta release announcement today, but bring it up again as background for the next item ... 5. Future Bacula development: as I see it, the Bacula project is undergoing a major change at the moment. First, more and more features are being contributed rather than being developed by me. This is very desirable and is a good sign for the future of Bacula. My thanks go out to everyone who has contributed to this project, be it by a code submission, preparing a platform release, documentation, answering a question on the mailing list, ... In the case of the increasing number of code submissions, it is requiring quite a bit of adapting on my part: more time spent helping submitters, looking at their code, integrating it, testing it, documenting it, less time for me to program ... This isn't at all a complaint, rather the contrary -- relief that others are helping code. It will be interesting to see where it leads to and how it gets there. Second, I'm hearing more and more requests for me to attend meetings and give presentations. This is something that I will devote more time to next year beginning in April. Finally, corporations (as well as users) are asking for more and more features, some of which are non-trivial to implement, some require expensive hardware (multiple drive autochanger, ...), all are very worthy, nearly all should be implemented to bring Bacula into the Enterprise, but not all of these future projects are personally interesting enough for me to implement them, and more importantly, I don't currently have the corporate insight to understand the problems well enough to develop the solutions. This latest Bacula 1.37 has been one of the most difficult for me because it required a lot of underlying structural changes, and was non-trivial. Because of the above points, I've decided to modify how I approach future projects by personally implementing more smaller features that interest me, and relying on software contributions to implement larger projects. I don't expect this to slow down the development pace of Bacula, but it will allow me to ensure a better code quality than the current system where I am too busy with large development projects to manage, review, and test contributions. Bottom line: if you want a major feature, try to help get it implemented by contributing the code, financing it, finding programmers, ... This modification may result in smaller more incremental releases containing only one or two features rather than the larger releases we have seen in the past -- perhaps something similar to how Linux development has evolved (purely coincidental). -- Best regards, Kern ("> /\ V_V ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
