Martin Dougiamas

Hi, James.

Thanks for the thoughts. You must have missed the news post which wrapped up this issue: http://moodle.com/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=619

I've basically come to see that changing the license is a bad way to achieve my aims (since people often break licenses anyway, and I have no wish to spend time dealing with legal matters).

The GPL license itself is a brand that carries many advantages (people know what it is, people are guaranteed certain freedoms etc) and so it makes a lot of sense to stick with it. The sense of freedom when using Open Source (and particularly GPL) software is a terrific thing.

On top of this is the issue that Moodle contains code by many different people (all under the GPL) as can be seen on the credits page. In future the percentage of software not by me will hopefully increase!

So instead of the "stick" of license law, I'm going to focus instead on the "carrot" of support (thanks to Greg for this analogy). Put simply, there will be good incentives to contribute to the Moodle project, and many different ways to contribute. I'm going to leave the exact details unpublished for a little while because they are still changing, but I hope to make some announcements about this new stuff soon.

I'm glad the hack for 1.0.8.1 is doing the trick for your site.

This whole issue has already been fixed properly (in CVS) by moving all the format strings out into the language packs.

For example, go to http://moodle.com and flip through the language menu up the top (and notice the date formats changing).

So rest assured that when the next release comes out you won't have to maintain your hack.

Cheers,
Martin

I think all this will be much easier in future versions (probably 1.1 or 1.2) because of two features currently in (paused) development:

- Groups, you will be able to define sub-groups of the people enrolled in a course, and all the modules will offer options that use groups

- The new journal module will allow forum-like discussions attached to each entry that may be private, but may also be made public blog-style (to the group or to the whole course).

In your situation one thing you could do using the current toolset is to ask them to post their initial answers to an "eachuser" forum, ask the others to respond to each other and discuss the results, then ask everyone to submit their final answers as an actual assignment.

Psst ... download Moodle 1.0.8.1 ... this bug was fixed in that release.

(tiptoes away again)

It's great to see all of you helping others out!

My 2c is I don't think the problem is because of the data files, but it could be a problem with sessions (there are a couple of bugs with some combinations of PHP and IIS on Windows).

Test this by going to: http://www.yoursite.com/moodle/lib/session-test.php

It should do the same as this: http://moodle.com/lib/session-test.php

See also: http://moodle.com/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=523