Future: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 05:52, 21 November 2012

Development

Moodle development is increasingly influenced by our community of developers and users.

Your contributions in the form of ideas, code, feedback and promotion are all very welcome - see the Developer documentation and the community forums for more details on our software development life cycle. A dynamic database of proposed features and their status can be found at tracker.moodle.org. You can also pay to have certain features developed sooner - see moodle.com/development for information and a quote.

For more detailed information, see our Roadmap for developers.

Moodle Project

Naturally people like to consider risks when committing something as important as education to a particular piece of software. This is particularly so with open source where they aren't paying for anything.

Here are answers to some of the frequent questions that we hear about this.

What happens if Company X offers to buy Moodle?

The copyrights to Moodle software can never be "sold" like they can for proprietary software. All our code is completely open source. The copyrights belong to hundreds of authors and they would ALL need to agree to any change in the license. Even if that happened, it would only apply to future code - all existing versions would remain under the existing GPL license and our large and very capable community of developers would simply fork from there and continue using and developing the GPL version.
The core developers of Moodle (Moodle Pty Ltd) are dedicated to Moodle only, and have no interest in damaging Moodle as a platform. EVEN if the worst case occurred and Moodle Pty Ltd ceased to exist then the software would not be affected - the Moodle user community (including thousands of large Universities and companies) would organise new leadership among themselves and continue developing Moodle under the same GPL.

What happens if Martin gets eaten by a kangaroo?

Same as above.
Kangaroos are herbivores. :)

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-{{About Moodle}}
+==Development==
-As Moodle gains in maturity, its directions are increasingly influenced by the community of developers and users. A dynamic database of proposed features and their status can be found at [http://moodle.org/bugs/ moodle.org/bugs]. Your [[Credits|contributions]] in the form of ideas, code, feedback and promotion are all very welcome - see the [[Documentation for Developers|Developers manual]] and the [http://moodle.org/help community forums] for more details. You can also pay to have certain features developed sooner- see [http://moodle.com/development/ moodle.com/development] for information and a quote.
-Here is the current roadmap of the future, though this is always subject to change depending on [http://moodle.org/donations/ sponsors] and [[Credits|developers]].
+Moodle development is increasingly influenced by our community of developers and users.
-== Version 1.6 ==
+Your [[Credits|contributions]] in the form of ideas, code, feedback and promotion are all very welcome - see the [[Developer documentation|Developer documentation]] and the [http://moodle.org/help community forums] for more details on our software development life cycle.  A dynamic database of proposed features and their status can be found at [http://tracker.moodle.org/ tracker.moodle.org].  You can also pay to have certain features developed sooner - see [http://moodle.com/development/ moodle.com/development] for information and a quote.
-* Blogs as the main tool for reflective activities (providing user, course and site feeds).
+For more detailed information, see our [[Roadmap]] for developers.
-* Database module, a general purpose tool for collaborative data entry, searching and browsing
-* Integration with LAMS as an activity or course format
-* Some better statistics
-* Incoming email handling
-* Basic Web Services API
-== Version 1.7 ==
+==Moodle Project==
-* My Moodle page providing a customisable overview of all courses, plus RSS feeds and so on.
+Naturally people like to consider risks when committing something as important as education to a particular piece of software.  This is particularly so with open source where they aren't paying for anything.
-* Improved User Profile page, integrating Blogs, feeds etc in a semi-public home page
-* Preliminary support for IMS LD Level A, allowing import and export
-* Full support for SCORM 2004
-* Improved Web Services API
-* Integration with some repositories
-== Version 2.0 ==
+Here are answers to some of the frequent questions that we hear about this.
-* Conditional activities, allowing dependencies and forced paths
+===What happens if Company X offers to buy Moodle?===
-* Complete support for IMS LD standard
-* Improved Groups, allowing groups to be defined at site and activity level
-* Improved Roles implementation, allowing custom roles at site, course and activity level
-* Many of the main pages customisable using HTML templates.
-* Some exciting developments in making Moodle more network-aware, with a natural evolution of Moodle's focus on collaboration. More on this here later.
-[[Category:Core]]
+# The copyrights to Moodle software can never be "sold" like they can for proprietary software.  All our code is completely open source.  The copyrights belong to hundreds of authors and they would ALL need to agree to any change in the license.  Even if that happened, it would only apply to future code - all existing versions would remain under the existing GPL license and our large and very capable community of developers would simply fork from there and continue using and developing the GPL version.
-[[Category:Administrator]]
+# The core developers of Moodle (Moodle Pty Ltd) are dedicated to Moodle only, and have no interest in damaging Moodle as a platform.  EVEN if the worst case occurred and Moodle Pty Ltd ceased to exist then the software would not be affected - the Moodle user community (including thousands of large Universities and companies) would organise new leadership among themselves and continue developing Moodle under the same GPL.
-[[Category:Developer]]
+===What happens if Martin gets eaten by a kangaroo?===
+# Same as above.
+# Kangaroos are herbivores.  :)