I have issues with Moodle as well, by the way, and I do feel it’s the victim of one of the perils of open source projects: it is not as polished as it should be, and it ends up with clunky bits and pieces and a crappy interface. I can’t really comment on the install base, it’s a good point however – metrics like that can be a slippery issue. Besides – maybe half the users are bots.

I question this claim. I think what happens is that in-group of opensource boosters tell each other on forums “Oh, I’ve just installed Moodle and I teach a class of 100″ or “I have 2,000 students in all my courses” and that way they can all claim “users”. These hapless users have Moodle pressed on them.

I encountered Moodle in that massively ridiculous massively multiplayer online course in “Constructivism” this last fall, and I found it clunky, annoying, filled with opt-out features people hated, etc. Like Drupal. Like other opensource thingies we are all “supposed” to like. If it worked, if it wasn’t clunky and non-user-friendly, if the people flogging it weren’t so religious about it, it if were self-evidently easy to use and helpful, I’d have no need to post here.