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Moodle
Wed, 21/06/2006 - 06:37 — David Goodwin
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Moodle
Three things have happened with regards to Moodle recently, which possibly seem worth writing about :
- A friend received a cease and desist letter from someone at moodle.com moaning about his use of 'Moodle Services', 'Moodle hosting', 'Moodle training', 'Moodle Consulting' and 'Moodle installation'. It appears they have a wide ranging trademark. While I understand there is a benefit to having commercial 'Moodle partners', Moodle has it's roots in the open source community - it seems rather short termed and defeating to restrict the online visibility of Moodle related resources. (Trademark registration).
- We've been using Moodle to deliver our training courses, and are using it for our current PHP training course at OpenAdvantage. Last night it suddenly stopped working, and only gave a vague error message about the database - after much rummaging around, I discovered that the lib/setup.php file was disabling PHP's
error_reportingand the DB password was somehow incorrect. </sigh> While rummaging through Moodle I was rather disappointed that it appears to have no decent logging infrastructure (I couldn't find any way to get it to log any sort of helpful message to a file). Thankfully re-enabling error_reporting fixed the problem. - I integrated mod_auth_pgsql with Moodle to allow me to restrict access to our training materials (the slides etc are all kept outside of Moodle in SVN). It seems to work, and was quite easy to setup.
Here ends the lesson.
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More details?
We've been chatting about this Moodle issue on the SchoolForge list and I was wondering if you could provide any more details about what he was asked to remove and why? The thread is available at:
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/sf-uk-discuss/browse_thread/thread/60b321aba956fcdd/c634155509923acb#c634155509923acb
So how do I access the slides?
I am on the Open Advantage course - how can I get at the slides remotely? (or did I misunderstand?)
Interesting about Moodle not wanting any mention - but as far as I understand, Open Source is not the same as free? If you can offer support, how can it ever become main stream?
2 for the price of 1 !
<snip> reply for tony removed </snip>
Sheri : http://moodle.palepurple.co.uk
Please understand that this
Please understand that this only refers to use of the
trademark in describing commercial services, eg "Moodle hosting".
It's a name thing. I don't like us having to send notices, but I am
required to protect the trademark - it's one of the stipulations of
getting a trademark in the first place and an important part of
keeping it.
People are free to use and modify Moodle under the GPL, and even
to construct whole business models around it if they want to,
I encourage that. The Moodle software can be referred to as
Moodle, no problems. People can offer courses for cost, no
problems.
This is only about describing COMMERCIAL MOODLE SERVICES, nothing
more, and this is a privilege that I "sell" to Moodle Partners, if you
like (they pay royalties for it, among other benefits). Do you have
the rights to start a McDonalds or be a Blackboard distributor
without permission? No.
Please understand that I am trying to create a viable business
model for Moodle as a sustainable project here. If there is no
advantage in being a Moodle Partner then no-one would want to
sign up, and then Moodle would not have enough income to pay
programmers to work on the features and stability and documentation
and downloads and community that everyone exects.
People can whine about it but where were they for the past six years
of my life while I was creating Moodle from scratch and trying to show
my young family that devoting all my time to Free software was
worthwhile? Imagine explaining to YOUR wife why you still can't
afford even a basic house to live in while overseas companies are
able to make as much money as they like from your work.
Free software still costs a lot of time and money to those who make it.
I am 100% committed to Moodle as Free software and this is the best
way I've found to keep me working on it.
Reply
My full reply on this matter can be read on the schoolforge-uk mailing list at the thread pasted by Tony above.
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