Martin Dougiamas

Not at this stage, no.  

This is not really big news ... Totara had already more or less forked a while ago.   The way their extensions are written make them impossible to merge back to Moodle core without rewriting them.   There are a lot of core changes, making it hard even for them to track us over time.   They kept their current code private (so it's not really open source) - same with their mobile app which also forked from our older one a while back.  Contributions back to core have been minimal.

I had really hoped for some closer open collaboration on this between our teams this year but it looks not to be.

Overhead is the key worry for me.

Apart from all our core work on Moodle and with Partners we're all very busy here setting up Moodle Association and MoodleCloud at the moment, which are designed to give us stable revenue to hire more people to work on Moodle core.

We don't have spare time to be managing small development contracts with large amounts of people or brokering tiny transactions with 3rd party developers.  Any moodle.org system involving plugin-based payments needs to be quite simple to set up and have almost no maintenance costs (which is why I suggested the subscription-based system above).

There are also the long-term effects of any changes on the community around this open source project that need to be considered well.

This is basically what moodleassociation.org is, for core.