Bacula Fiduciary License Agreement with FSFE

Hello,

It gives me great pleasure to announce, that as we have recently discussed on 
the bacula-users and bacula-devel lists, last Wednesday the 15th of November, 
I signed a Fiduciary License Agreement with the Free Software Foundation 
Europe.  This transfers the Bacula copyright on most of the Bacula source 
code, which was previously held in my name to the Free Software Foundation 
Europe.

Basically, this fiduciary agreement allows FSFE to look after the legal 
aspects of the copyright and license without any direct responsibility for 
the project with the following benefits to the project:

1. The project to continue as before but without most of the administrative 
burden of maintaining the copyright. 

2. If there is any violation of our copyright, we now have a strong defense 
(the FSFE team comprises many legal experts in Europe).

3. The Bacula users now have a guarantee that the Bacula code will remain Free 
forever (what better guarantee than to have it in the hands of those who 
created the movement).

4. The copyright is now independent of any one person.

Just to re-iterate, there is no change to the license, which remains GPL v2 
with 4 additions, the only change is who holds the copyright.  As the FSFE 
and I agreed, though the procedure is very similar to what we have already 
been doing, there will be some small differences in the procedure:

1. The copyright assignments will now be accomplished using the same Fiduciary 
License Agreement (FLA) that I signed (I'll have a copy on the web site in 
the near future).

2. All existing developers with CVS commit access should sign a copy of the 
FLA by mid-2007 (for those of you who have already signed the old Bacula 
copyright assignment within the last year, this should not be necessary).

3. Anyone who contributes more than 20% of the total content of a file will be 
asked to sign the FLA even if he/she is not a "developer".

4. Developers will be asked to re-sign the FLA once every two years.  This may 
sound like overkill until you realize that technically it is only possible to 
effect a copyright transfer *after* the code has been written and not before 
(though signing the FLA before does certainly indicate intention).

My profound hope is that these new procedures will not add any significant 
inconveniences for the developers, but it will ensure that the Bacula source 
code remains free and unencumbered with copyright problems.

Finally, I would like to thank all the contributors to Bacula over these years 
for the confidence they have placed in me to keep Bacula source free.  In 
addition, I appreciate the many kind remarks that were made during our 
discussion over the last month of this change.

Best regards,

Kern

PS: there still remains a good amount of work to do in the next few weeks to 
complete this job: change of all the copyright statements in the files, 
completion of the AUTHORS file I recently added to the source directory, 
updating the manuals (change copyrights and document the new procedures), and 
update the web site ...

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