Dear community,
In May 2025, the Board of Directors of the Chamilo Association, together with its voting members, met and voted for the complete dissolution of the Chamilo Association, with the governance of the Chamilo project being transferred to BeezNest Belgium. This change took effect on January 1, 2026.
The Chamilo Association was founded in 2010 with the aim of promoting the Chamilo project, facilitating coordination among its many stakeholders, providing neutrality and transparency in decision-making processes and, in the long term, contributing to the development of the software.
Over the years, however, it became apparent that, given limited resources and a global context marked by a decline in contributions to Free Software projects, the Chamilo Association provided relatively limited added value to the project, despite significant efforts to improve the situation.
It also became clear that BeezNest Belgium, one of Chamilo’s official service providers and, since 2014, its responsible publisher, was already carrying out most of the tasks originally assigned to the Association.
Over the years, the BeezNest team has therefore (with the support of the Association):
- developed the software,
- addressed security issues,
- set up and maintained most of the Association’s infrastructure,
- supported new contributors,
- voluntarily developed features requested by the community,
- organized events (both online and in person) to promote Chamilo and foster exchanges within the community,
- managed the translators’ workflow and provided nearly 100% of the English, Spanish, and French translations over the past ten years,
- conducted research to maintain Chamilo’s relevance,
- and, more recently, invested several thousand hours of its own resources in developing Chamilo 2.0, whose release is planned for the coming weeks.
BeezNest is particularly well positioned to take on this responsibility. The company was born within the Free Software ecosystem: one of its founders was notably president of the Brussels Linux Users Group and a developer of one of the first specialized Linux distributions.
For my part, as the current head of BeezNest, I have been involved as one of the founders of the Chamilo project since early 2010 (and was even one of the initiators of the original idea), and I have led it from day one, with the success you know today. As a company, we have also contributed to many other Open Source projects over the years (we stopped counting them a long time ago).
This decision should therefore have no significant negative impact on the Chamilo project or on your day-to-day use of the platform. On the contrary, it is intended to simplify processes and accelerate our ability to act, in order to secure an even stronger future, with more resources focused on innovation and support for the community.
We are aware that some people may wonder about the risk of the Chamilo project being privatized and the potential consequences this could have for Free Software or Open Source. This is precisely why BeezNest has published a commitment charter clearly defining our role as the new steward of the Chamilo project. This charter, available here, guarantees free and sustainable access, openness to contributions, transparency, and alignment with our educational mission. Nothing changes regarding these fundamental principles.
I am personally deeply committed to the success of the Chamilo project. Although Chamilo originated from an earlier project, given the scale of the work invested by my team and me, it is now legitimate to consider it our creation, and we have no intention of letting it fade away.
Yes, as a company, we have an explicit objective of profitability, but this can only be achieved by providing strong added value through our solutions. A long time ago, BeezNest made the strategic choice to develop Free Software in order to achieve this. The way the project has been managed over the past fifteen years is the best illustration of this approach.
It is possible that we may develop certain paid modules in the future in order to provide more resources to the project. This would constitute a net benefit for Chamilo, enabling faster growth and stronger support (Odoo is an excellent example of this). Rest assured, however: we will never compromise the fundamental objective of the project, namely to increase access to quality education worldwide. Paid features would only concern professional stakeholders, never teachers or trainers in their day-to-day practice.
We hope that you will share our conviction that these developments are reasonable and beneficial for the future of Chamilo.
Finally, I would like to warmly thank all the members of the Chamilo Association’s Board of Directors, as well as all its past and present members, who have contributed to the project through their time, financial resources, or other means. Your contributions have been invaluable, and we hope to continue to count on your support through BeezNest Belgium.
Kind regards,
Yannick Warnier
15 years leading the Chamilo project
11 years President of the Chamilo Association
6 years Director of BeezNest