Toutes les langues
English
Français
Español
Solutions Open Source efficaces
Chamilo is a new project that opts for open source in a radical way. It aims at bringing you the best e-learning and collaboration platform in the open source world. At its start it will come in two flavours: Chamilo 1.8.6.2, the direct successor of Dokeos 1.8.6.1, and Chamilo 2.0, that has reached the final stages of development, a new taste of e-learning and much more, that will definitely bring fresh and creative tools to you.
Chamilo is also a brand owned by everybody who is part of the association Chamilo.org. The trademark is not and will never be owned by a single trademark holder.
Chamilo is lead by a legal non-profit association founded in Belgium in 2010, formed by at least 3 effective members and 7 personal, institutional and business members with a common goal of getting the best results from their e-learning and collaboration solution.
The main objectives of the Chamilo Association are to protect and improve the e-learning and collaboration software Chamilo and to build, protect and increase a community of teachers and enterprise learning coaches who want to improve the efficiency of teaching and their courses through the use of our software.
The association will organize events, training and ensure that documentation is published to a high quality standard, and will encourage contributions from both for-profit and non-profit members, through the allocation of grants for a series of activities recognized as benefiting the community and/or the software. One of the key ways to get there is to implement an official certification program whereby people and organizations can be recognized as official providers of Chamilo solutions.
If you have a limitless budget to spend, then no, it is not important to you. In any other case though, an open-source software guarantees:
The short answer is: about 90% of the active developers of our previous project. If you consider any software, you can imagine a ratio of 1% or less developers for 99% of users. Now if you look at development activity reporting websites, like http://ohloh.net/p/dokeos/contributors, you will find a list of contributors/developers, and a corresponding graph showing their recent activity. We consider any developer having been active in 2009 as an "active" developer. Most older developers do not influence the future of the product anyway...
There are 22 developers having contributed to Dokeos this year. Of these 22 developers, 19 are moving to Chamilo, 1 is staying on the Dokeos side, and 2 more will probably not get involved in Chamilo for professional reasons, but are very occasionally developing inside Dokeos. That's about 90% of the current development force moving to the new project. This also means that there will be a considerable competence gap as the know-how is not slowly passed on to the next generation in the Dokeos project.
This allows us to get a quick list of active developers who are moving to Chamilo::
Two of the 19 Chamilo developers are Zend Certified PHP Engineers, the highest-level certification available in software development in the programming language used by Chamilo. Another one is an expert senior teacher with development skills. The rest are divided into half professional developers in private companies and half professional developers in universities and university colleges. We believe that with this set of skills in our team, we have the tools to go fast forward, working on a tool that will exceed your expectations. Other contributors (translators, community supporters, teachers, professional trainers) are not mentioned here. Please consider them as the 99% of the community distribution that are not developers.
As proof of the strength of this initiative, we have decided to bring you immediately a new stable version of our software: Chamilo 1.8.6.2, that shows that we can be independent, faster working and very organized. Obviously, we will continue doing just this in the future. Just give us a chance.
That's what we hoped until the end. We have tried the diplomatic way for a long time, but our counterpart has proven an unreliable ally in support of the community and, owning the exclusive property of the trademark, a very dangerous partner to work with. What we have built together for years had been threatened by a possibility of exclusion from the project. After more than one year struggling to unite our efforts and to limit the damages of removing documentation or pieces of software from the solution, or generally misunderstanding the open-source business model, we decided to let go and show our own way of doing things is based on more respectful principles.
Of course, we expect there will be difficult times, but we are sure that by keeping an open mind and a trademark protected by a non-profit association, we will provide Chamilo with a brighter future.
Of course! We really hope that a lot of private businesses will join us, and we have discussed it with them, and made everything possible to encourage them to join. We hope that a healthy market will develop around Chamilo, so that private businesses can grow and help us grow. We want to avoid parasitism, though, so we are putting a few measures in place to protect our project and give incentives to new companies to join. The association will offer advantages in the form of grants on the next association subscription:
plus a bunch of other things that will be submitted to approval by the association
Of course, private companies will have the right to develop their own extensions privately and make money out of it, but we want to make sure this is based on good intentions, and something is given back to the community in exchange.
Open source software allows small and medium sized business to grow and compete with more powerful companies, always thinking about Chamilo as a group and a part of themselves. Take something from the community, but also give something back: that´s our goal. As we know this is difficult to do for private businesses, that is why we are helping them to do that through incentives.
We have setup a page where you can define, according to your profile, how you can contribute in your best way to the project, being a teacher, a student, a developer, a typewriter, a translator, a designer or anyone not mentioned here. There's always a way to contribute.Please see our contribution page.