Greetings from Moonami HQ,
Earlier this month Learning Technologies Group (LTG) formally Blackboard & MoodleRooms, announced the acquisition of Moodle Partner, eThink Education. For many, this news means that if you left OpenLMS (formally Blackboard & MoodleRooms) for eThink, you may be on a path back to OpenLMS. This news also follows the acquisition of Australian Moodle Partner, eCreators in 2020, marking a further step in LTG’s goal of consolidating the Moodle market. Moodle HQ’s Official response to the LTG acquisition: eThink is No Longer a Moodle Partner
We take this opportunity to reemphasize our commitment to the open-source Moodle and its vibrant community. As some of you know, Moonami’s unique contract-free business policy was intentionally designed over 9 years ago to shift ALL the control and ownership of your Moodle LMS to YOU the client instead of the vendor. Our unique business policy is a core business value of ours, and one that we believe aligns perfectly with the spirit of open-source. More importantly, it safeguards our clients from this type of disruptive business behavior that we have seen many times before.
At Moonami, we take pride in ensuring that all of our clients not only own their financial arrangement, but they also own their Moodle data — at all times. Moreover, Moonami’s AWS cloud hosting and support offering is packaged without ANY proprietary components or code thus removing any risk of vendor dependency. We have always believed that using Moodle as your open-source learning platform should come with the freedom and flexibility that commercial closed-walled LMS systems can’t offer. However, these open benefits shouldn’t have to come without the dreaded LMS contract lock-in and limited control of your Moodle platform. We feel strongly that any software or agreement that is locked down, restrictive, or vendor-specific IS in fact proprietary, not open.
I’ll quote Martin Dougiamas, creator of Moodle™ and CEO of Moodle Pty. Ltd.:
Moodle LMS, the Free, open source engine we all build and depend on, that drives and supports hundreds of millions of registered Moodle users and our loyal Moodle community has, and will always, underpin our mission to empower educators to improve our world. We remain committed to public code, the open source project and more broadly, open source values of open exchange, collaborative participation, transparency and community-oriented development.
It is with these principles and ideals that Moonami aligns.
From all of us here at Moonami, have a happy, healthy, and safe holiday break. We will be here for you in 2021.
John Porten, President