Does the world's growth go along with a Moodle sites reduction?

In a growing world with growing education needs, one would think that systems like Chamilo or Moodle would have a continuous growth ensured, year after year. Well, this is certainly true for Chamilo LMS (for now), as it is apparently gaining about 100,000 new users per month (average over the last 12 months), but I am a little in shock at how Moodle is (since a year or so) loosing a considerable amount of sites and users over the last 12 months. It's a bit difficult to track, because Moodle stats site doesn't show any evolution of amounts over time (anymore), but thanks to our beautiful internet, you can use the Wayback Machine to get the data as it was years ago. A warning to the reader: I am an active Chamilo evangelist and this is in no way an objective, scientific analysis of the situation. This isn't to say that I am inventing the existing data. It comes from reliable sources and should be consider as such for all intended purposes. So, just for the sake of the data, here is how both projects are evolving in number of sites and users over the last 4 years (almost the full life of the Chamilo LMS project). This article is written in June 2014, so the last two lines are pure speculation. The rest, however, comes from real data from Moodle's site (and the Wayback Machine) and Chamilo's database.

Year	Moodle sites	Chamilo sites	Moodle users	Chamilo users
mid 2011	54K	1K	43M	0.5M
mid 2012	66K	2.3K	58M	1M
mid 2013	84K	6K	71.7M	6.2M
mid 2014	64K	14K	71.1M	7.6M
mid 2015? (linear projection based on last 12m)	44K	22K	70M	9M
mid 2016? (projection based on last 12m)	24K	30K	69M	10.4M

[caption id="attachment_3773" align="alignright" width="300"] Stats: Moodle usage vs Chamilo usage from 2011 to 2014 + projection[/caption] The last two lines are an obvious flame. There is no way this could be like this, but if it were (and it's a linear projection based on the last 12 months from now June 2014, it could be curved projection), then these would converge in number of sites by June 2016 :-) As always with statistics, there are important things to know about both projects, and while Moodle is a great tool, it is still somehow a friendly rival to Chamilo, but in an ever-growing world with easier installers and cloud computing, I would expect Moodle to continue to grow... pretty much endlessly. Not sot. A few years back (in June 2012), the Moodle stats page still offered a graphical representation of the number of Moodle installations around the world, over time. You could (at that point) clearly see a Gauss curve reaching the top and starting to go down. However, the numbers here show that even then it managed to grow an additional 13M users (and 18K sites), but then between June 2013 and June 2014, it just stalled in number of users, and literally dropped 22K sites, to lower-than 2012 level in terms of sites. A little bit later than June 2012, the chart was removed (I guess they didn't like showing the dropping Gauss curve, huh?) Sure, that also means that most of these sites had a very low number of users (or something like that), as this only went with a loss of 600K users overall (so 30 users per site, on average). Or maybe Moodle stats just changed their algorithm at some point, dropping thousands of sites that were not really active? Chamilo and Moodle statistics are bound to be somewhat imprecise, anyway, as they rely on a series of relatively subjective parameters that are interpreted to try to guess if the sites are still active or not. Plus Chamilo is still clearly not getting to the number of users Moodle has (we're only at 10%), but the tendency is that we are growing fast enough and that, if it continues as in the last 12 months, we should be crossing Still, this leaves you thinking... Free software (no barrier to adoption), free or very cheap hardware, growing world population... why did it drop? Will it continue to do so? Well, that just leaves me with an excellent marketing opportunity, to tell you that, if you want to try Chamilo out, you can test our recently released version 1.9.8 on https://campus.chamilo.org. Now.