Uniservity + Moodle

I have just spoken to a reliable source that grilled the Uniservity team at BETT about this.

Uniservity will be giving schools the option of using Uniservity or Moodle. The difference being that they will be hosting the hardware and administering the Moodle based platforms aswell. The reason they have done this is so that all the people complaining about Uniservity not being Moodle will stay with them.

For those of you concerned about cost, Moodle is actually open source software. You pay for the Hardware, and administration cost of techs like you and me running it. You can pay the Moodle (.com) Company, setup by moodle (.org) for support, consultation, etc which in my opinion is a waste of time as the forums on Moodle.org are so good.

Uniservity will still be Uniservity. They will just offer, in my opinion, a better option to run Moodle instead of the Uniservity rubbish.

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Originally Posted by Jed

I have just spoken to a reliable source that grilled the Uniservity team at BETT about this.

Uniservity will be giving schools the option of using Uniservity or Moodle. The difference being that they will be hosting the hardware and administering the Moodle based platforms aswell. The reason they have done this is so that all the people complaining about Uniservity not being Moodle will stay with them.

For those of you concerned about cost, Moodle is actually open source software. You pay for the Hardware, and administration cost of techs like you and me running it. You can pay the Moodle (.com) Company, setup by moodle (.org) for support, consultation, etc which in my opinion is a waste of time as the forums on Moodle.org are so good.

Uniservity will still be Uniservity. They will just offer, in my opinion, a better option to run Moodle instead of the Uniservity rubbish.

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If that's the case there should be a difference in cost, as it hasn't cost uniservity anything to develop it.

Also will schools be able to add there own modules? i doubt uniservity could handle schools moving from in house to hosted as most users moodles are in the tens of gigs of data.

I thought the original plan was for county to have the equipment to host SLG and the county wide VLE, if uniservity are now going to use moodle, county have effectively wasted hundreds of thousands pounds when they could have got a good developer in at £50,000 instead of spending £300,000ish on uniservity.

this is going to be an interesting network managers meeting in feb.

Tell me about it.....if you've been to the Uniservity meetings, this has been a nightmare from start to present and I can't see it getting any easier.

Accessing resources is always going to be an issue. The NGN stats are terrible, so even the smallest schools will struggle!

One of the guys from here asked Sandra South about it this week, they didn't even know! If they have blown that much on it then i believe this could get worse before it gets better....

Regardless of cost (I'm sure Uniservity are paying something for Moodle), I'm just happy they have decided to offer it as an option...

Thanks for the additional information.

with this all in mind, I believe Paul LeFevre, e-learning co-ordinator of East Sussex gave a Best Practise Seminar on Flexible Learning in East Sussex at BETT.

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Originally Posted by penfold_99

with this all in mind, I believe Paul LeFevre, e-learning co-ordinator of East Sussex gave a Best Practise Seminar on Flexible Learning in East Sussex at BETT.

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Best practice:
1) charge schools for a VLE that they don't want
2) let schools implement their own moodle, at extra expense
3) realise that the schools were had a point, when they said the LA VLE sucked.
4) get company to support the moodle
5) ???
6) profit..

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Originally Posted by Jed

(I'm sure Uniservity are paying something for Moodle)

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They don't have to, because Moodle is GPL.

But I can confirm that they are absolutely not paying anything for Moodle nor (at this stage) contributing anything at all to the Moodle project.

Note that Moodle Partners (listed at Moodle Services - moodle.com) do contribute at least 10% of their gross revenue to pay Moodle developers.

Cheers,
Martin Dougiamas

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Originally Posted by moodler

They don't have to, because Moodle is GPL.

But I can confirm that they are absolutely not paying anything for Moodle nor (at this stage) contributing anything at all to the Moodle project.

Note that Moodle Partners (listed at Moodle Services - moodle.com) do contribute at least 10% of their gross revenue to pay Moodle developers.

Cheers,
Martin Dougiamas

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Hi Martin,

I have a question about licensing of plugins, if i create a plugin, am i able to choose the licence its released under ie non-commercial/education only or will it need to be GPL?

Looks like the poor loves at Uniservity have taken the Best VLE poll to heart:)

I don't anticipate them killing the goose that lays the golden eggs with a full scale migration to Moodle, imagine the outcry!

More likely that it will be a optional extra for those existing and more importantly NEW customers who want to host "in house" for speed and configuration/MIS integration ease.

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Originally Posted by Jed

Uniservity will still be Uniservity. They will just offer, in my opinion, a better option to run Moodle instead of the Uniservity rubbish.

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This will mean, either you will have Uniservity or Moodle. It is yet to be seen how this will be setup, however if Uniservity charge people as they do now, they will not beable to justify such a high fee if people keep their platform in-house.

As I see it they have one option, to host Moodle and administer it from their side.

Also the GPL licence is full of holes. If Uniservity make a profit from hosting Moodle as part of a package, which they will be, then they are breaking the GPL licence terms. Hence, Uniservity should be paying for it, Moodle should not let them get away with not paying for it.

I was well informed of this yesterday after I had the same view, having looked into it I came to the conclusion of the above aswell.

If we have any GPL Licencing geeks on here, I'd be more than happy to be set straight as I am no expert and this would save us all money! :D

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Originally Posted by Jed

If Uniservity make a profit from hosting Moodle as part of a package, which they will be, then they are breaking the GPL licence terms.

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From my understanding of the GPL, I don't believe this is the case.

The GNU General Public License - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)

The original GPL

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Originally Posted by penfold_99

Hi Martin,

I have a question about licensing of plugins, if i create a plugin, am i able to choose the licence its released under ie non-commercial/education only or will it need to be GPL?

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As I understand the GPL, as plugins are discrete entities you can license them how you like. They would only be forced to be GPL if they were somehow merged into the code of a GPL product (which is a contradiction in terms really when you're talking about plugins)

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Originally Posted by Jed

If Uniservity make a profit from hosting Moodle as part of a package, which they will be, then they are breaking the GPL licence terms.

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Originally Posted by webman

From my understanding of the GPL, I don't believe this is the case.

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webman's correct. Uniservity are perfectly entitled to sell moodle, and to make a profit just as redhat are entitled to sell linux.

Although in respect to Martin's comment, it is a tad cheeky of Uniservity (read: absolutely disgraceful) to make money out of the moodle project, whilst paying for the development of a competing product !
I hope they cough up some of their millions that they gained from the taxpayer to pay for moodle development.

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Originally Posted by sahmeepee

As I understand the GPL, as plugins are discrete entities you can license them how you like. They would only be forced to be GPL if they were somehow merged into the code of a GPL product (which is a contradiction in terms really when you're talking about plugins)

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thanks, i think of putting a non-commercial licence on my sims.net moodle module so to stop uniservity benefiting from my work, but not affecting schools use.