From "community" to "commercial" FLOSS: The case of moodle

Abstract

This paper documents the evolution of Moodle, an advanced Content Management System, and its transition from a purely volunteer-based project to one driven by commercial interests and stakeholders. The study of its evolution provides evidence of the sustainability of its process: increasing amounts of provided effort by developers correspond to similarly increasing produced outputs to the Moodle system. It is also evident how this OSS system, apart from achieving the transition to a successful multisite, collaborative and community-based OSS project, depends more on its community than its commercial partners.