User talk:KernSibbald

Statement of Association
So that it is clear, I (Kern Sibbald) am the principal author of the Bacula project (with help from many other contributors) thus I have an interest to ensure that the Bacula page is accurate and does not contain material that is inappropriate for Bacula (competitor advertising, denigration of the Bacula project or its members). From what I can see, the Bacula page was started in 2006 (not by me) and has evolved over time, with changes from many people, including myself. Though there have been a few edits that were either not clear or not accurate, these were easily changed and no dispute ever ensued. I have also edited a few minor details in several other pages, but my main focus has and will remain Bacula. KernSibbald (talk) 06:19, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

April 2014
Hello, I'm MusikAnimal. I noticed that you recently removed some content from Bacula with this edit, without explaining why. In the future, it would be helpful to others if you described your changes to Wikipedia with an edit summary. If this was a mistake, don't worry, the removed content has been restored. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thanks. &mdash; MusikAnimal talk 15:37, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Notice of Edit warring noticeboard discussion
Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion involving you at Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring regarding a possible violation of Wikipedia's policy on edit warring. Thank you. --Gul.maikat (talk) 17:55, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Please do not remove content or templates from pages on Wikipedia, as you did to Bacula with this edit, without giving a valid reason for the removal in the edit summary. Your content removal does not appear constructive and has been reverted. Please make use of the sandbox if you'd like to experiment with test edits. Thank you.   Wikipelli Talk   19:15, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Hello, KernSibbald. We welcome your contributions to Wikipedia, but if you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about in the article Bacula, you may have a conflict of interest or close connection to the subject.

All editors are required to comply with Wikipedia's neutral point of view content policy. People who are very close to a subject often have a distorted view of it, which may cause them to inadvertently edit in ways that make the article either too flattering or too disparaging. People with a close connection to a subject are not absolutely prohibited from editing about that subject, but they need to be especially careful about ensuring their edits are verified by reliable sources and writing with as little bias as possible.

If you are very close to a subject, here are some ways you can reduce the risk of problems:


 * Avoid or exercise great caution when editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with.
 * Be cautious about deletion discussions. Everyone is welcome to provide information about independent sources in deletion discussions, but avoid advocating for deletion of articles about your competitors.
 * Avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Spam).
 * Exercise great caution so that you do not accidentally breach Wikipedia's content policies.

Please familiarize yourself with relevant content policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have a conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. Thank you. Katieh5584 (talk) 19:37, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Please stop your disruptive editing. If you continue to blank out or remove portions of page content, templates, or other materials from Wikipedia, as you did at Bacula, you may be blocked from editing. Thank you. Katieh5584 (talk) 19:47, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

This is your last warning. You may be blocked from editing without further warning the next time you vandalize a page, as you did with this edit to Bacula. Katieh5584 (talk) 19:53, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

The problem seems to be that none of you are reading the material that they have placed on the Bacula page, nor have you followed the links and read the material at the end of those links. There is a lawsuit in large part simply because Bareos has been slandering the Bacula project, and yet you criticize me for removing their vadalism of the Bacula page. If you keep allowing them to propagate slanderous material through your website, you are putting your self in the position of participating in slander. Please read the material, read what is at the other end of the links, and then read what is on www.bacula.org -> Bareos, and you will see that none of that is appropriate here, in particular material put up by people who are accussed of theft of prioprietary software, copyright violations, and unfair competition. In perhaps a slight overstatement of the situation is that you can be accused of "aiding and abetting criminals". Why can you simply let me prevent all those problems by removing the offending statements. This will only improve the quality of wikipedia. Allowing wikipedia to be used for speading untrue propaganda is not improving wikipedia or its image. Do I need to get a court order to pull this stuff down? Where is the verification of the content they put up? The only references they put up are links to their own Bareos website with the same missinformation that is the subject of a lawsuit.

Talkback
  Wikipelli Talk   19:54, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Response to talkback
My view is very simple. Bareos has been vandalizing the Bacula page by putting up their own self-serving propaganda, and your team is not even following your own rules. The material they are putting up clearly has words that are at the least controversial and criticsm. Their references are to their own website, thus the references are not verified as you require. They are biased because they have set themselves up as a Bacula competor. They cannot be neutral toward Bacula yet you allow their material to remain and accuse me of being a vandal. Admittedly I don't understand all your rules, but they are not playing by the rules. They are currently accused in a Swiss lawsuit of software theft and unfair competition, which encompases the denigration of the Bacula project that they have done over the past year and posted on their website. Rather than allowing me to simply remove this controversial information that is subject to a lawsuit, you are allowing them to propagate their missinformation to your very public and visible website. I thought you were a "pedia", but you are acting more like a tabloid allowing companies to air disputes via wikipedia. You can say that my view is subjective, but it is backed up by a lawsuit, and you are helping the people who are accused in the lawsuit. That engages your own responsibility. In addition why do you permit someone to block me who clearly does not master English? -- he doesn't have the required skills to understand if the vandals are Bareos or me. All he sees is that I have repeatedly taken down information. No one on wikipedia has looked in detail at that information. It is pretty hard for me to imagine that I am vandalizing a very visible page about a product to which I have devoted the last 14 years of my life. The world including Wikipedia has gone insane. KernSibbald (talk) 22:07, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
 * You have not been blocked
 * A court case is nothing until the final verdict - we cannot pre-judge the result, we just add the data that led to the law suit's instigation.
 *  Ron h jones  (Talk) 00:28, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Despite what you say, I *have* been blocked (at least from removing or changing the Bareos propaganda). The statements that are currently there, basically added by Bareos are misleanding.


 * In 2010, a fork of Bacula was started by contributors that were dissatisfied with the current conduct (by which principal developers allegedly silently ignored contributions), and the change to a closed-source license model for the newly created Enterpise version of Bacula.[5]

Now, that is quite a mouth full. Bereos was actually started by a single Bacula contributor (not "contributors") plus four people who are are managing directors of a commercial company and are not contributors to Bacula. No contributions were silently ignored as it was the responsibility of that contributor who forked Bacula to integrate the contributions. Bacula has remained 100% open source. The sentence implies that it became closed-source. There is a ccompany named Bacula Systems that is an "open-core" company that provides over ninety percent of the contributions to the Bacula 100% open source community. The above is clearly spin-doctoring and not true.


 * Eventually, this fork was made public under the Name Bareos in early 2013. It's main goals are to keep the software truly open-source, to ease configuration and introduce new features.[6]

Again the above is misleading (first it has a typo and the structure of the first clause is faulty. The software that Bareos took is 100% open source and will remain so. The second sentence implies the contrary and thus is misleading. Their configuration is not at all eased or improved over what is currently available -- another misinformation.  Yes, if you work in secrecy during three years at a minimum one should have some new features, but this is hardly worth publishing.  Instead one should ask: why weren't those feature offered to Bacula the 100% open source project?  The real reason is more likely that four out of the five founders of Bareos are commercial people who sell open source software for a living.  There is nothing wrong with selling open source software, but it is incorrect the imply that they are the big saviors that will make Bacula open source. Nothing is farther from the truth.


 * Bacula Systems accuses Bareos of plagiarism and copyright violations and opened a lawsuit[7] against Bareos and a former Bacula community member in early December 2013, alleging violation of IP (theft of proprietary software) and unfair competition.

The above is true, though the lawsuit also charges Bareos with copyright violation. What they leave out is that the Bareos project as it initially stood had additional copyright violations, that for the most part they fixed, but only after the Free Software Foundation Europe contacted them and asked them to remove the violations.


 * The Bareos project in turn considers those accusations as ungrounded FUD.[8]

This is not a fact. It is a biased subjective point of view by people who have a conflict of interest and should be removed.

In all the above items the references are all either to their own Bareos website, which if anyone examines it you will find that it makes rather nasty unsubstantiate accusations against the Bacula project, myself (Kern Sibbald), and Bacula Systems, 99% of what they write is untrue or misleading. The other references are to articles that were written by them, that were clearly trying to promote their commercial interests. In over a year since the Bareos release, they have made very progress building a community of users.

I forgot to mention, prior to this Bareos section, there were four references, now they are eight references. Three of the new ones go off to Bareos propaganda, and the fourth goes off to the Bacula Systems statement. Why do you permit one small paragraph to double the number of references, especially when I tell you that this is controversial information and that the instigators of this information have a subjective and biased position. As I have clearly said, I prefer to take down this information because it is counterproductive to the open source world, subjective, and misleading. I have described above at length why this information is not desirable. Please look back at the history of the changes, and you will see that there was a reference to Bacula Systems (they mention the Bacula Enterprise version) which has been removed, and over time, I simply tried to rewrite the incorrect information that they posted to be more neutral, but that was not effective because everytime I either toned down what they wrote or added counter arguments, they were taken out that the same misleading discourse was put back.

Blocking me may be effective in preventing any changes, but doing so also continues to propagate untrue statements that damage Bacula's reputation. Furthermore I find it amazing how many little trolls there are out there that have nothing better to do than to blast back this misleading information, and this despite the fact that a good number of well meaning people have clearly tried to fix it and clearly indicated that the information is not true.

Conflict of interest
Hello, KernSibbald. We welcome your contributions to Wikipedia, but if you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about in the article Bacula, you may have a conflict of interest or close connection to the subject.

All editors are required to comply with Wikipedia's neutral point of view content policy. People who are very close to a subject often have a distorted view of it, which may cause them to inadvertently edit in ways that make the article either too flattering or too disparaging. People with a close connection to a subject are not absolutely prohibited from editing about that subject, but they need to be especially careful about ensuring their edits are verified by reliable sources and writing with as little bias as possible.

If you are very close to a subject, here are some ways you can reduce the risk of problems:


 * Avoid or exercise great caution when editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with.
 * Avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Spam).
 * Exercise great caution so that you do not accidentally breach Wikipedia's content policies.

Please familiarize yourself with relevant content policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have a conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. Thank you. Joja lozzo  16:34, 20 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Can you explain why you have added this comment just now since the exact same message was already posted on 9 April 2014? I do not have a conflict of interest, but I definitely have an interest to insure that incorrect information is not put on the Bacula page, since Bacula is an open source project that I started 14 years ago. Your first point above: "Avoid or excercise ..." is exactly what I am trying to prevent competitors doing to the Bacula page. KernSibbald (talk) 19:39, 21 April 2014 (UTC)


 * My apologies. I didn't see that other message. I suggest you keep this one on the page so no one else will repeat my mistake. I also recommend you post your affiliation with Bacula on your user page.
 * How do you know it's your competitors who are editing the Bacula page? The sources are available to the public. Anyone could search the web or come across them in some other way and update the page. I strongly recommend you view the advice of the COI notice above as intended for you and exercise extreme caution in making any changes to the Bacula page without discussing it on the talk page first. I have seen many inexperienced editors with their own agenda, especially those with a conflict of interest, lose their editing privileges because they fail to comply with policy. Joja  lozzo  22:11, 21 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for responding. I have to admit, it took me a few minutes to find the other citation so it wasn't so obvious. I will leave the one you put. I will add my affiliation with Bacula in a new section, if possible at the top of this page.


 * User:Gul.maikat is Maik Aussendorf, who is one of the 5 Bareos managing directors. Although it is possible that someone is usurping his identity, it is highly unlikely as I am used to his writing style (excellent spin doctor -- and typical German mother tongue grammatical and spelling errors when writing English). He began adding Bareos changes to the Bacula page in April 2013 (if I remember right). These changes were essentially advertisement of features that Bareos had that Bacula did not or does not have (they were developed in secret over a 3 year period and never offered to the community). He has also posted Bareos advertisment on the Bacula LinkedIn page.  From what I read about how wikipedia works, contributors should not be making changes to competors pages. This is clearly the case here.


 * At the moment, the Bacula page is locked down and includes the Bareos text which I believe violates a number of your rules. Since the page is locked down, I am unable to change it. Given that Bacula Systems (the commercial part of the open source Bacula project) has sued Bareos, and that their first response to the suit is what someone else said "very agressive", there is little or no chance that any kind of mediation will work.  Now that I have read more of your rules, I will post on the pages that seem to be most appropiate to get a resolution.  Thanks for your comments. KernSibbald (talk) 06:10, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

September 2014
Hi, I'm 322Q4K. I contributed to the Bacula page regarding the Bareos fork and current dispute between Bacula and Bareos. I noticed that you reverted content and did not provide details or references on where the "agreed statement" came from. Wikipedia guidelines state "Encyclopedic content must be verifiable." Your vague reference to an "agreed statement" is not verifiable unless you provide a source. Please provide a better reason for reverting content. I do not use either Bacula or Bareos, nor am I in any way affiliated with yourself or Mr. Außendorf. You have a history of reverting legitimate information on Bareos and have declared your present involvement with the Bacula project. Please stop reverting legitimate information. 322Q4K (talk) 21:09, 10 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, part of what you contributed to the Bacula page is simply incorrect. This was confirmed by Maik Aussendorf himself, and documented on the Talk:Bacula page, so clearly those changes must be reverted. You bring up a point about "agreed statement".  This too was discussed over a fairly long period on the Talk:Bacula page. I copied what another editor suggested with only minor cosmetic changes. What he said appears to be a good resumé of what all the others said. I clearly stated what I was going to do before making any changes, and there were no objections. Prior to you changing this text, the correct procedure is to discuss your proposed changes on the Talk:Bacula page.  Doing so would have avoided you posting erroneous information and avoided you revering a topic that had been discussed with no opposition for several months. I also mentioned on the Talk:Bacula page exactly why I was reverting your text. If, you as you say, you do not use either Bacula or Bareos, then it is unlikely you you have a good understanding the history of the project or the Bareos fork, and thus you should rely on the other editors who commented with a consensus on the Bacula talk page. You say that I have a history of reverting legitimate information on Bareos.  While it is true that I have reverted controversial information written by Bareos, it is also true that as the other editors clearly stated, the information that I reverted was inappropriate. Since Bareos is a competitor and a Bareos director edited the Bacula page, he violated the Wikipedia rules that clearly indicates that a person should not edit his competitor's pages. On the other hand, my personal association with the Bacula project is in no way in conflict with the Wikipedia rules. While the existence of the Bareos fork as well as the lawsuit are part of the Bacula history, and thus legitimate to include on the Bacula page, Wikipedia is not the place to wage legal battles or post personal accusations one way or another nor is the Bacula page the place to post detailed references and information about Bareos.  If you want to put more information about Bareos, then please start a Bareos page and post it there. I ask you to please stop editing the Bacula page and to remove the incorrect information you posted. If you have ideas to discuss please do so on the Talk:Bacula page prior to making changes. KernSibbald (talk) 19:49, 11 September 2014 (UTC)