Blackboard and WebCT merge

Acidangl writes "Blackboard and WebCT, leading providers of enterprise software and services to the education industry have announced plans to merge." From the article: "Under terms of the agreement, Blackboard will acquire WebCT in a cash transaction for $180 million, which values the offer at approximately $154 million, net of WebCT's August 31, 2005 cash balance of $26 million. The ultimate value of the offer will vary depending on WebCT's cash balance at closing."

Comments

"Holes" can happen anywhere, even on an OS

[Work Account]

By "OS" I mean simply file/directory permissions.

In college I was looking through shared files/directories of a computer science professor because he had code snippets from lab and problem sets etc. shared for us to access.

Unfortunately I was able to get into a directory that students should not have and suddenly I saw files that looked like solutions to the current programming project.

I didn't look but I think 80% of other students would have.

I phoned him immediately at his home number, and he was annoyed at the dinnertime call and I think wondering how/why I found it, but was glad in the end because he could appropriately "chmod 600" the directory instead of "666" or "777" like it was set.

My whole point is that security holes and such can often just be human error and not the actual software.

This nothing new; don't take it out on Blackboard.

Too many mergers. Where's the control?

[syousef]

This is getting ridiculous. I used both Blackboard and WebCT as an Astronomy Masters student a couple of years ago. Both were awful and I never did understand why anyone paid money for these solutions when this is one area where open source can easily provide the basic functionality, but...

What's with all the mergers lately? In 3D graphics, Autodesk aquired Discreet (3ds Max, GMax) a while back, and then Alias (Maya) days ago. They then promptly killed the free GMax product which a lot of game developers (both paid and hobby) use. There are also now very few competing products in the 3D market to compete. (Killing GMax is actually quite big news but I haven't been able to get an article on this accepted on /. - These days if it doesn't contain the company names Google or Apple, good luck...)

I thought there was suppose to be some kind of government control to prevent monopolies from springing up. I guess they're too busy with the "war on terrorism" and prosecuting music/movie/software "pirates" to actually police these laws...and there's no money in it!