Moodle Blogger MoodleUS has the number one quality of a good security analyst - paranoia. But is it paranoia if everyone is out to get you?

I was sentenced to 12 months hard time by Martin Dougiamas (judge, jury, and executioner).

He has been banned from Moodle.org forums, for as far as I gather, some heated exchanges over Moodle security and Moodle Partners. I won’t go into it here but Moodle Partners are providers of Moodle hosting who are officially vetted and sanctioned in some way by Moodle itself. For this they get the right to use the name Moodle which is trademarked and carries certain restrictions over its use (and you thought Open Source was free and cuddly). Basically there is money to be made with Moodle now. It’s free and fairly easy to install and run (relative say to an Oracle database) and there is money to be made doing this . Expect more fights.

I don’t really see it as surprising if core Moodle people feel the need to eject people from the Moodle.org forums. People who think Open Source = Democracy are on the wrong track. Open Source projects often have highly centralised control structures. They give away a little but they keep a lot and maybe this is part of their success. For the detractors of an open source project of course there is always the opportunity to start a fork of the code. Take the code change it, call it something else and sell it yourself. I’ll be posting my first release of Roodle here soon.

It is a pity MoodleUs (Steve) is not still on the Moodle forums however. For instance here is a salutary video from the MoodleUs blogger about password policies (and password hints) in Moodle:

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