Copyrights

To avoid future problems concerning changing licensing or copyrights, all code contributions more than a hand full of lines must be in the Public Domain or have the copyright transferred to the Free Software Foundation Europe e.V. with a Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) as the case for all the current code.

Prior to November 2004, all the code was copyrighted by Kern Sibbald and John Walker. After November 2004, the code was copyrighted by Kern Sibbald, then on the 15th of November 2006, Kern transferred the copyright to the Free Software Foundation Europe e.V. In signing the FLA and transferring the copyright, you retain the right to use the code you have submitted as you want, and you ensure that Bacula will always remain Free and Open Source.

Your name should be clearly indicated as the author of the code, and you must be extremely careful not to violate any copyrights or patents or use other people’s code without acknowledging it. The purpose of this requirement is to avoid future copyright, patent, or intellectual property problems. Please read the LICENSE agreement in the main Bacula source code directory. When you sign the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) and send it in, you are agreeing to the terms of that LICENSE file.

If you don’t understand what we mean by future problems, please examine the difficulties Mozilla was having finding previous contributors at www.mozilla.org/MPL/missing.html. The other important issue is to avoid copyright, patent, or intellectual property violations as was (May 2003) claimed by SCO against IBM.

Although the copyright will be held by the Free Software Foundation Europe e.V., each developer is expected to indicate that he wrote and/or modified a particular module (or file) and any other sources. The copyright assignment may seem a bit unusual, but in reality, it is not. Most large projects require this.

If you have any doubts about this, please don’t hesitate to ask. The objective is to assure the long term survival of the Bacula project.

Items not needing a copyright assignment are: most small changes, enhancements, or bug fixes of 5-10 lines of code, which amount to less than 20% of any particular file.

Possible Next Steps

Go to Copyright Assignment – Fiduciary License Agreement.

Go back to Developer Notes.

Go back to Developer Guide.