Visvanath Ratnaweera

A second opinion on Ken's opinion? Ha, ha, ha! It is like asking the general practitioner to endorse the specialist's opinion. But this particular question is an easy one: Git is the best, it is the work of Linus Torvalds - next to Linux, where we meet.

Seriously, I'm surprised that "an install where so many things are tried out" is not on Git.

About the other problem you had with a Moodle 3 upgrade, the rational way is to investigate what went (you did) wrong and learn from it, not to avoid double jumps. One could argue that the missing Git caused it. Either way, I am cautious, it looks like you work straight on the production Moodle, not on a trial instance. Again, may be, because you miss the correct tool?
'-)

In that case I would have gone to 4.3. It has corrected some overdone UX changes in Moodle 4 and after four minor releases very stable. Your bad experience with the long jump 4.1 LTS > 4.4 doesn't mean that long jumps generally go bad.

Moodle 4.1 LTS is PHP 8.0 capable and even PHP 8.1 capable since Moodle 4.1.2. See http://www.syndrega.ch/blog/#php-and-dbms-compatibility-of-major-moodle-releases. So one alternative would be to upgrade PHP to 8.0 or 8.1 first.

Caution: I don't know whether it is a good idea to upgrade PHP in a production server.

And also, I don't know why you go from 4.1 LTS to 4.2, which as a non-LTS has a shorter life span. See https://moodledev.io/general/releases.

From my practical point of view, IANAL, the first question is whether:

- it is OK for the developer his plug-in being used in Moodle Workplace as long as somebody maintains it, fix the bugs, for example

OR

- the developer does not want his plug-in to be used in Moodle Workplace.

If it is the former, if HQ takes that responsibility, the matter is solved. If it is the latter, that is a bigger problem. The developer has to start by analyzing GPL3(?) to see whether it allows this usage. If so, change the license. And then he needs more lawyers to see that the new license is compatible with the Open Source Moodle license.