Martin Dougiamas

Yep, that's about right.

Someone messed up the 1.6 branch today by resetting all the MOODLE_16_STABLE tags to match HEAD.

I don't know who did it, I hope it was accidental!

I've spent an hour so far fixing it, nearly there.

This is really old news. The patent is currently being re-examined by the USPTO.

http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/20070125a.html

And in the meantime, Blackboard made a pledge:

http://www.blackboard.com/patent/FAQ_013107.htm

You're right there are a lot of gray areas in the (post) modern Internet.

In almost all these cases use of the trademark is in fact fine!

However, it's very hard to define ALL the cases in an un-ambiguous way (new situations arise all the time!). We also have the problem of people assuming or mis-interpreting things, as you can see very clearly from discussions like these.

So if you aren't sure about a specific case, just do what it says on the license and ask at http://moodle.com/helpdesk ! It'll take you 2 minutes and you will get a clear unambiguous response in writing which you can file away!

Hmm, interesting scenario.

I don't think giving a real user the guest role across the whole site will in fact let that user into courses that have guest access enabled.

You might be able to just use enrolment keys for the courses (perhaps the same one for all) or perhaps some modification can be made to Moodle to allow this scenario.

Tell me more about what those 85% users are going to do in those courses? Will they be full participants or just "viewing"?