webman Posted January 22, 2009 Posted January 22, 2009 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. From my understanding of the GPL, I don't believe this is the case.
danIT Posted January 22, 2009 Posted January 22, 2009 The GNU General Public License - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF) The original GPL
sahmeepee Posted January 22, 2009 Posted January 22, 2009 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? 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)
CyberNerd Posted January 22, 2009 Posted January 22, 2009 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. From my understanding of the GPL, I don't believe this is the case. 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.
penfold_99 Posted January 23, 2009 Posted January 23, 2009 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) 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. 1
User3204 Posted January 23, 2009 Posted January 23, 2009 The simple thing for Uniservity to do (although probably difficult technically), is to make a moodle-like wrapper for their site, so that all the Moodle plugins will work in it. This will be difficult for Moodle to stop / police. Although in theory these modules are SCORM compliant anyway. They could possibly get away with just dual hosting (internally) Moodle and their VLE, and then they're just calling up the modules from a moodle install. ALl they have to do is get a plugin/module/applet that allows talking between their VLE and a Moodle install, (which they can then also give away for free, as it just feeds use of their VLE). Depending upon how they did this (assuming I'm not talking our of my ) then you may be able to connect in moodle modules/plugins that you host on your own server(s).
iusher Posted January 26, 2009 Posted January 26, 2009 Uniservity have one of those - I was talking to one of their ex-school people who was offering us the ability for our Moodles to communicate with instances of their CLC product if we wanted to do cross-LA working. My understanding is that it's either a Moodle module which will dip into the CLC or the other way around...
Burt Posted January 28, 2009 Posted January 28, 2009 Ok...what I have to ask is... We are being told by ESCC that Moodle is not BECTA approved and shouldn't be used... If it is the case that Uniservity will be using Moodle as a back end?? Where does this sit with BECTA?
penfold_99 Posted January 28, 2009 Posted January 28, 2009 Ok...what I have to ask is... We are being told by ESCC that Moodle is not BECTA approved and shouldn't be used... If it is the case that Uniservity will be using Moodle as a back end?? Where does this sit with BECTA? There isn't a BECTA list of approved VLE's, it's a BECTA list of approved suppliers of VLE's. Moodle didn't feature due to the companies supporting it not qualifying. If VLE's were approved on features and usability moodle would be street ahead of the pack. 1
Burt Posted January 28, 2009 Posted January 28, 2009 REALLY... That's really useful thanks. Sounds like people need to get their facts straight before spouting off!?
iusher Posted January 28, 2009 Posted January 28, 2009 (edited) Hi folks, Having spoken to a contact at UniServity, it's probably worth clearing a few things up: UniServity say they aren't moving to Moodle as a back-end UniServity aren't going to offer a choice between the CLC or an instance of Moodle UniServity are going to offer a module which (possibly) will sit within Moodle and allow access to a CLC instance As someone has pointed out earlier in this thread, Moodle wasn't rejected by Becta, remember the LP Services framework was about services, rather than products. I've written elsewhere about how your school or LA can have Moodle if they want, even if they are going with another LP Services provider - it just needs to be specified that that's what you want. Whether anyone will actually do that is another thing... Ian. PS, in fact, here's a statement from UniServity. These aren't my words... UniServity is a Becta framework learning platform which means that a stringent set of functionality and conditions have had to be met to meet the requirements of Becta. We do however offer a different approach to traditional learning challenges through our connect learning communities, projects and social learning approach. We therefore are looking to expose as much of our functionality to other school technologies such as Sharepoint and Moodle so schools can enjoy the additional functionality and value that UniServity bring. At BETT, UniServity demonstrated two prototype developments exposing functionality of UniServity to Moodle and Sharepoint. These pilots have been designed to enable schools to access the UniServity cLc functionality through legacy installations or internally hosted technologies such as Moodle and Sharepoint. UniServity will not be moving to these technologies, but will continue to create as many connectors and interfaces into our community as possible so it can be conveniently accessed via any device or technology. My comments on this would be: everyone's doing social learning now. Some providers could even spell "constructivism" given a dictionary or a word processor. I like the use of the word "enjoy". Edited January 28, 2009 by iusher received statement from UniServity 1
Burt Posted January 28, 2009 Posted January 28, 2009 Therefore meaning I don't have to go out and sign up to UniServity as they are going to make it talk to Moodle...bring it on! This could be a useful trend if all VLE providers do this especially for cross LA Diploma delivery...
TechMonkey Posted January 28, 2009 Posted January 28, 2009 My mind can't quite grasp at the moment, why would you want one Learning platform to show another? why would any school want to have 2 LPs? Or is it a case of providing an easy access point to someone elses through yours?
penfold_99 Posted January 28, 2009 Posted January 28, 2009 UniServity is a Becta framework learning platform which means that a stringent set of functionality and conditions have had to be met to meet the requirements of Becta. We do however offer a different approach to traditional learning challenges through our connect learning communities, projects and social learning approach. We therefore are looking to expose as much of our functionality to other school technologies such as Sharepoint and Moodle so schools can enjoy the additional functionality and value that UniServity bring. At BETT, UniServity demonstrated two prototype developments exposing functionality of UniServity to Moodle and Sharepoint. These pilots have been designed to enable schools to access the UniServity cLc functionality through legacy installations or internally hosted technologies such as Moodle and Sharepoint. UniServity will not be moving to these technologies, but will continue to create as many connectors and interfaces into our community as possible so it can be conveniently accessed via any device or technology. This statement is very interesting for a number of reasons. What cLc functionality will be avaliable? If it's connecting schools together then moodle sites can do this. Will the cost of the connectors be equivalent to the cost of uniservity?
Domino Posted January 28, 2009 Posted January 28, 2009 will a connector allow linking LDAP accounts to uniservity ones.....
Burt Posted January 28, 2009 Posted January 28, 2009 We are part of a Rural Partnership delivering Diploma's. We cannot deliver all the Diploma's on our site so have to ship our Students to other sites, who may or may not have Moodle - hence the issues. The way the Diploma's are going this may even mean that cross LA learning is looming. Therefore having a common LP would be the obvious choice but that isn't going to happen, so if LP providers make their products talk to others it would make could practice and certainly make things easier to manage - surely?? (PS:I don't want 2 LP's I just want to stick with Moodle, however the "County Recommended" LP is UniServity.)
KarlGoddard Posted January 28, 2009 Posted January 28, 2009 My mind can't quite grasp at the moment, why would you want one Learning platform to show another? why would any school want to have 2 LPs? Or is it a case of providing an easy access point to someone elses through yours? Yep, its to allow easy sharing of resources from school to school - or within a cluster etc My *personal* opinion is its because Uniservity is still a pretty much marginal platform (in terms of number of installs) they're looking at any angle they can to integrate their platform with other platforms which have a bigger slice of the pie, which Moodle obviously has. Any attempt to facilitate sharing of resources between sites and schools is a good thing so I'm quite happy that they've adopted this approach
uniservity Posted February 9, 2009 Posted February 9, 2009 Wow what a response to our BETT demonstration! I'm not sure where the information is coming from but I thought it might be useful to clarify UniServity's position on this. At the BETT show we demonstrated two proof of concepts around integration with other technologies, SharePoint and Moodle. UniServity technology is not based on either of these products, nor will we be replacing our learning platform technology with Moodle. The UniServity cLc is used by millions of learners globally and we are keen to extend this community to include as many learners as possible. One of UniServity's great strengths is the ability for students and teachers to quickly and easily establish virtual communities and engage in learning experiences with people around the world. We recognize that schools may have invested time and resources in building their own learning platform solution. However, we are keen to enable these users to easily gain access to the UniServity connected Learning community – through providing UniServity Widgets that work within other technologies such as Moodle or Sharepoint. As Martin stated, we do not have a commercial relationship with Moodle, we do not provide Moodle services and we do not intend to do this in the future. The reason for these developments is to extend the reach of our community of users and enable easier integration of technologies. I'm sure you'll have further comments ………….. Dawn Mulholland Chief Operating Officer UniServity
Edu-IT Posted February 9, 2009 Posted February 9, 2009 Ah, just as I thought Uniservity were coming up with something good!
Jed Posted February 10, 2009 Author Posted February 10, 2009 This is different to what we were told, even up to 2 weeks ago, we understood this differently. We were recently told this at a Uniservity meeting, however, at BETT we were led to believe you had an option to replace Uniservity with Moodle. Slightly concerning! Still atleast Uniservity are finally listening.....these changes can't come soon enough!
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