Dokeos

Dokeos will probably end up in the history books as the project that spawned Chamilo.

The lead developers all abandoned Dokeos because of unhappiness with the way the company managed the project; more and more code was closed up and new features were no longer provided as part of the free "community edition". As a response, they set up Chamilo as a truly open source project, embracing the ideals of the free and open source software community and making the legal owner of the code a nonprofit organisation.

The proof is visible right here on Ohloh in the "5 year commit count" graph: there's a big bar of commit activity up until January of 2010 and then a sharp drop. The 5 year commit count of Chamilo is the inverse of this graph. It's clear where all the manpower went.

This whole episode has an uncanny resemblance to the events that led to the fork of Joomla! from the Mambo project back in late 2005, and I am confident that Dokeos will end up having the same fate as Mambo: as a footnote in history and an example of how NOT to manage a free software project.