Libre Software People's Front

I remember the first time I had to deal with a development based on Moodle. It was more than 6 years ago but I still remember that everything was prepared to attract people and boost the creation of a stronger community. Today I had a look at the number of Moodle and the activity of its leader, Martin Dougiamas, and I have to say I am quite happy Moodle is being such a big success.

First let’s have a look at the big picture:

• Moodle has a large and diverse user community with over 1,128,626 registered users on the moodle.org site alone, speaking over 78 languages in 217 countries.
• As of October 2010 it had a user base of 49,952 registered and verified sites, serving 37 million users in 3.7 million courses. Currently (December 2011) it has a user base of 72,168 registered and verified sites, serving 57 million users in 5.8 million courses. Wow! “serving 57 million users”! Well done Moodle team .
• There are around 50 companies that compose the “Moodle partners” network. It offers services around Moodle and help with the development. The services that they offer are: hosting, support, consulting, integration, developing of the courses, customisation and certification.

But, what about its creator and leader?. I wanted to find out the role played by Dougiamas during the last years, so I analysed the git repository with cvsanaly (the development team maintains a git mirror of the cvs they use for the development). This was what I found out:

	Martin Dougiamas (blue bar) is by far the person who has committed more changes to the Moodle’s source code repository. The project started in 1999 but the oldest record we have in git is from 2001.
	The chart on the left shows the top ten committers by 2003. Martin Dougiamas used two different accounts (blue bars) and the rest of the developers made only a few contributions. We could say that in 2003 the community was starting to grow up and Dougiamas was still the only person that worked full time on it.
	The role of Dougiamas in the last two years is very different from the one he played during the first years. Currently the community has a big number of developers (238 total code committers), and there are 19 that are more active than Dougiamas in term of commits. It seems that he is dealing with other tasks but still wants to be involved in the development.

I believe that Moodle is a very interesting case to be deeply studied. If you are part of the moodle community and find any errors, please let me know.