(announcement also published on the Chamilo forum today)
Dear community,
In May 2025, the Chamilo Association's board and its voting members assembled and voted to retire the Chamilo Association completely and to hand the keys of the Chamilo project to BeezNest Belgium. This change will be effective as of tomorrow, January 1st, 2026.
The Chamilo Association was founded in 2010 with the goal of promoting the Chamilo project, facilitating coordination among its many actors, providing neutrality and transparency in the decision-making process, and, in the long term, contributing to the software's development.
As the years passed, however, it became clear that with limited resources and a global trend of reduced contributions to Free Software projects, the Chamilo Association was adding little value to the Chamilo project, despite expending considerable effort to improve.
It also became apparent that BeezNest Belgium—one of the official providers of Chamilo and, since 2014, its responsible editor—was already handling most of the work the Association was meant to do. Over the years, the BeezNest team has (with the support of the Association):
- developed the software,
- addressed security issues,
- set up and maintained most of the Association's infrastructure,
- provided support to new contributors,
- developed features requested by the community (on a voluntary basis),
- organized events (both online and in-person) to spread the word about Chamilo and enable its community to learn from each other,
- managed the translators' workflow and handled nearly 100% of all translations to English, Spanish, and French over the last 10 years,
- conducted research to keep Chamilo relevant, and
- more recently, invested thousands of hours using its own funds to develop Chamilo 2.0 (to be released in the next few weeks).
BeezNest is the ideal company to take on this responsibility, as it was founded in the cradle of Free Software: one of its founders was previously President of the Linux Users Group of Brussels and a developer of an early specialized Linux distribution. I, as the current manager of BeezNest, am one of the founders of the Chamilo project in early 2010 (actually one of the initiators of the idea) and have led the Chamilo project since day one, with the success you've all witnessed. As a company, we have contributed to many other Open Source projects over the years (we stopped counting).
This decision is thus not expected to affect the Chamilo project—or your use of it—in any substantial way. In fact, it should streamline operations and accelerate our progress, ensuring a brighter future with more focused resources on innovation and community support.
We understand that some might worry about the potential privatization of the Chamilo project and how it could affect its Free Software or Open Source characteristics. This is why BeezNest has published a charter outlining our commitments as the new steward of the Chamilo project. You can read this charter here. It guarantees perpetual free access, open contributions, transparency, and alignment with our educational mission—nothing changes in that regard.
I am personally deeply committed to the success of the Chamilo project. Although we started from another project, given the immense work my team and I have invested, it can now be said that it is our creation, and we have no intention of letting it fade.
So, yes, as a company, we have an explicit goal of making money—but this can only be achieved by providing high added value through our solutions. Long ago, BeezNest decided that the best way to do so is by developing Free Software. This should be evident from how we've managed the project over the last 15 years.
We might develop additional paid modules in the future to secure more resources, but this would be a net benefit for Chamilo, enabling faster growth and stronger backing (Odoo is a great example). Rest assured, we will never compromise the project's core goal: increasing the availability of quality education worldwide. Paid features would only impact those doing business with Chamilo, not the everyday teacher striving to provide better education. We stand firmly by that.
I hope you'll agree that these changes are reasonable and represent a net benefit for Chamilo's future.
I would like to extend my thanks to all the Chamilo Association Board Members and Association members over the years who have contributed their time, money, or other resources to the project's growth. Your contributions are very much appreciated, and we hope you'll continue supporting the project through BeezNest Belgium.
Sincerely,
Yannick Warnier
15 years Leader of the Chamilo project
11 years President of the Chamilo Association
6 years Manager of BeezNest