What are Moodle Partners?

Well, they are professional businesses and individuals that have a lot of experience of working with moodle, an established track record in supporting the Moodle community, and an ability to provide quality moodle-related services (such as site hosting, installation services, consulting and Moodle support contacts).

Moodle partners pay an annual fee and a royalty on all moodle-related business that they do. These fees and royalties go directly to the Moodle trust, to help pay for things like the moodle.org servers, the Moodle office, salaries for the core development team and so on. So by using a Moodle partner for your services, you are directly contributing towards keeping the moodle development effort going, and helping get new moodle features out of the door and onto the Internet for everyone to use.

In return for partner fees and royalties, Martin Dougiamas and the developers at Moodle.com provide direct priority support to partners (and thus their clients).

As Moodle is 100% open-source software, licensed under the GPL there is of course nothing to stop you downloading and using moodle yourself. There is nothing to stop you using moodle yourself in a business, or even offering moodle-related services (and many companies do, without contributing one penny to the ongoing development of moodle). However, if you wish to use the Moodle trademark in conjunction with offering moodle-related services, then you need to become a partner. This is the main reason why the moodle trademarks exist - to try and ensure that, through the partners, Moodle will always have a revenue stream to enable it to keep growing and developing.

Every Moodle Partner is appointed directly by Martin Dougiamas, and he has the final say over who is allowed to offer moodle services using the Moodle trademarks.