Hi Gordon,
There's probably going to be a lot of misinformation where bareos is concerned. The developers forked that product claiming that when they signed license assignments they didn't know that this could or would allow Bacula to begin a dual-license release in which some features were added to a separate proprietary release. Bacula's developers claim that the fork included code that was not licensed to them. Their lawsuit was settled with undisclosed terms. Given what information is available publicly, I am inclined to believe that the fork was in the wrong, but users are often more concerned with protecting people that they like than they are in license compliance.
thanks for this interesting background information!
On the other hand, I'm not trying to defend one company against the other - their lawsuit has been settled as you wrote, and so that's stuff that is in the past and doesn't have much relevance from a technical viewpoint.
When I switched from Bacula to Bareos it was a purely technical decision, driven by the ease of maintaining an installation of Bareos vs. Bacula. In the meantime, the forks have diverged a bit, and there are some very interesting features (such as a flavour of opportunistic TLS encryption based on PSK) that make me stay with Bareos.
Leon's suggestion of creating a Backup SIG that could - among other things - maintain an RPM release of recent Bacula versions would IMHO really help Bacula a lot. At least it would eliminate my first reason for switching, and probably it would never have happened had current releases been available more easily.
Cheers,
Peter.