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Blackboard Patenting Educational Groupware
chizz writes "Online learning provider Blackboard announced the other day that it has patented the Learning Management System (LMS). The very same day it went after Desire2Learn for Patent infringement in a truly Salt Lake City kinda way. A great many educators are a bit shook up by this, and are stockpiling prior art all over the place. "
We were talking about this on a UK ml the other day; there are a number of Moodle people worried about this.
It's a patent so bad it looks like the EPO won't grant it. Which is really saying something.
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
What will this mean for moodle?
Well. You can't patent something as ubiquitous as a content managment system which is what blackboard is (Sure a special type of CMS but still it's a CMS)
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
of the incompetence in the US patent office. There is nothing patentable about Blackboard. It introduces nothing new to teaching, to learning, or anything. It's a horrible patent, and I hope the court finds the patent invalid. Besides, Mallard was the first online teaching environment, so UIUC should be suing Blackboard.
I've just lost a lot of respect for these guys with this patent BS. Long live Moodle!
If they can prove in a court of law that there is prior art, I don't see what the fuss is all about. Whatever stupid patent the attacking company shows, it will be laughed out of court and will probably be declared null and void.
Of course, that's assuming the judge involved in this case still has functioning grey matter, which may be a bit too optmistic. Then again, SCO is in dire straits, so there is still hope...
One thing is certain though: this case proves, if that was still needed, that the US Patent Office does not have any grey matter left. I mean, another (fairly-obvious-sounding) patent that could be invalidated with prior art? How many of these exist out there "in the wild", to be used by rich b______s?
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
http://mfeldstein.com.nyud.net:8080/index.php/webl og/permalink/blackboard_patents_the_lms
I think my patent on separating raw oxygen from atmospheric gas using red cells predates your patent and even violates it!
I even patented beowulf cluster of red cells, anybody is using it now and i will wait few more years than starting to sue and charge everyone.
Blackboard was garbage until GWU sold them Prometheus, which practically makes up their Blackboard software now. Can you patent something somebody made without patenting and sold to you?
If Ford built a car and sold it to you without patenting it, could you then turn around and patent it?
I wonder what dividends owning a security hole pays?
/ 0463.html
http://seclists.org/lists/fulldisclosure/2006/Jul
I'm confused. What is "a truly Salt Lake City kinda way?" Patent Polygamy? A beatdown from The Mormon Stick of Justice(TM)? Eating 6 saltines in a minute?
Hey, there's lots a reasons to jab at SLC but not because a company not based in Utah (but in Washington DC and Phoenix) filed a lawsuit in a Federal Court that just happens to be in that city. Now if you want to complain about the hookers on State and 400 South, well ...
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
According to the filing, the party whose bogus patent is allegedly being infringed is incorporated in Delaware and has its primary office in Washington D.C., while the alleged infringer is a Canadian company.
But the suit itself is being filed in Texas, and the suit names statutes that give the court jurisdiction.
Does this mean they chose this court because it's run by Bushies who instinctively love monoplizers and hate entrepreneurs? Or is there another reason for this choice of venue?
In a logical world, you'd expect the lawsuit to be filed where one or the other of the companies has its HQ.
I know, it's not a logical world. The USPTO proves that. But this geographical silliness is another example of the general legal ludicrosities we USians now deal with instead of having sensible laws and courts.
Fah!
- Robin
When you find that you have to use patented Educational materials, it's time to go back to the ole drawing board and educate yourself at the local library & on the internet.
From Blackboard's website:
"For nearly a decade, Blackboard has been a thought leader in the e-Learning industry and has developed products that have helped to fundamentally alter how educational institutions and their educators teach and communicate with students," said Michael Chasen, CEO of Blackboard.
We were fundamentally altered, alright.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Not just the company, but the product.
When released their Blackboard 6 software caused all kinds of trouble in time lost and support at my college, to the point where a Bb rep came out to apologize to IT and the instructors. One instructor stood up and demanded that Bb make reparations for money spent in lost time.
My college also uses them for student organizations. But I'll tell you, Google Groups and independent hosting makes for a more effective solution. For one, a Blackboard cluster doesn't share session data across servers--each server maintains session data locally, which means you can't use HTML links to point to resources within Blackboard, from within Blackboard. In fact, you can't hardlink to a Blackboard resource, period.
The discussion board software is designed to be reset after every semester, which means you have to delete and recreate a Blackboard module each time, which leads to more work for instructors. The semester-centric view also makes the discussion software clunky for student organizations, which only reset once per year, if at all. I have to sift through comments dating back to September of last year before I get to recent material. Plus, there's no way to archive and search the comments.
The announcement mechanism doesn't support RSS, or even--as far as I can find--a way to send out emails automatically when announcements are created.
I could go on...I've been bending this software to my needs for a few years now.
I wish I could put my name to this, but I won't. I'm a little too paranoid for that.
Here's Martin Dougiamas' comments on this topic... he's Mr. Moodle, it seems. http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50597#23 1617 very clearly states there's no need to panic. Surprisingly, Australia and New Zealand have already allowed this patetnt, though!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I can't imagine this isn't a long term strike against the Open Source LMSs out there. There's no real commercial competition anymore in the field with WebCT gone. Desire2Learn, Angel and the rest are ants under the feet of the Blackboard elephant, but Sakai and Moodle are getting real traction- the real buzz at EDUCAUSE isn't at the BB booth but at Sakai talks, the college just up the road dumped BB for Moodle this summer, etc.
I had a long conversation with some BB salesdroids last year and they more or less admitted that BB's long term future isn't their LMS, it's the OneCard system. They get a cut out of every purchase made with it, and it's a real cash cow.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Aside from being slow and ugly, it is one of the buggiest pieces of software I have ever used. Whenever I go to check my grades it will say something like 10 points possible for assignment, your score 7, class average 11.2. This thing is worse than Diebold.
I certainly hope that nothing comes of this. D2L isn't any sort of super rich business, and I certainly do not want to have to tell a campus full of neophyte Professors and students that they have to learn a new system. Heck, it's not like D2L exactly puts on a good front for the online learning aides that are out there. One of the most frequent calls that my help desk gets is a new problem has arisen with D2L.
The problem is not that there are 'good' and 'bad' software patents, even if such a distinction can be made (since clearly it's a relative judgement).
The problem is that there is no mechanism that can filter the very damaging software patents from the less-damaging ones. At least, as far as experience shows in the USA and Europe, any legal definition that allows some software patents can be systematically broadened to include them all.
The only barrier to the really damaging software patents - the ones that claim ownership of an entire software ecology - is a blanket ban on the patenting of software, period. In Europe this is called the "subject matter" criteria, which is the key barrier to software patents in Europe. Prior art, triviality, and industrial application (the other criteria) are hackable to mean anything one likes. Lawyers have also been hacking the subject matter, but it's harder, since the European Patent Convention clearly does not allow patents on computer programs. (The hack usually starts by saying, "ah, but we're not patenting the program, just the underlying methods...")
The Blackboard patent looks truly obvious, but that's not enough of an argument to invalidate it. One needs to prove it was unobvious when it was filed and that your prior art can be documented to before that date as well. I've seen in patent suits in Europe that this can be very difficult, even for well-funded firms. Once granted, a relevant patent has an even chance of surviving, no matter what you throw at it. Ask Microsoft... they've been at the sharp end often enough.
Eventually, we need to see a movement to ban the patenting of software in the USA, much like this movement already exists in Europe. The alternative is to see the software ecology get more and more subverted, to the point where small-to-medium firms cannot innovate any longer, which is a bad place to be in an information economy.
To those who say, "if it's a bad patent, fight it in court", please understand that being at the receiving end of such legal instruments is tantamount to being at the end of a large gun. Small firms cannot afford lawsuits, even frivoulous ones, and it's incredible that the USPTO should have turned into an accomplice and tool of such legalized extortions.
Who stands up for the small-to-medium IT firms?
My blog
Public policy wonks love software patents because in Public Policy Wonk Happer Wonderland, systems that work on paper work in real life. What should scare legislators is that our companies have resorted to patenting so much crap like this. It means that America is getting lazy and dangerously short-sighted. I would argue that cases like this prove why America needs to introduce some danger, not protection, into its companies' environment. Danger makes people competitive and responsive to change. Security makes them complacent.
I teach PT at a local college that uses this product. I haven't signed up for it as I thought it was clumsy and needless. For them to pull something like this, just further strengthens my desire not to use it and start asking questions why we do.
I forgot what I wanted to say, but honestly, it was important.
It's well known that Blackboard has received contributions from M$ and has been the only reason they were profitable. So, Bb buys out WebCT and now they are going to start sueing the other LMSs. For those that don't know, WebCT created WebCT Vista and the Vista product name is being changed. This has gone beyond being a mere coincidence.
I mis-read the title as "Blackbeard Patenting Educational Groupware" and thought that the pirate party had taken off a lot better than expected
One of their mouthpieces has a Yahoo! email address.
Anyone who has worked in the IT department of a school/school district has had to deal with the HORRIBLE software that ripoff-artists like Blackboard manage to sell to clueless managers.
I would venture to say that the vast majority of software marketed to schools/universities is pure crap. And the best part is, it's MASSIVELY overpriced, too, since most schools get government grants to buy this stuff (and, again, the people who approve these purchases generally have no idea what the stuff is worth).
Screw all of the educational software companies. They're leeches feeding of the ignorance of stupid administrators and pork-barrel funding.
It's time to start applying the corporate death penalty to companies who abuse the system this way. Blackboard would make an excellent poster child.
Making me remember the horrors of college... And the shit that was blackboard. It was always down for repairs and the online exams were trivial to cheat at.
What a crock...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I'm at the Desire2Learn User's Conference right now in Guelph, Ontario. The buzz here is that the whole patent is ludicrous and only serves to further D2Ls status as a major player in the LMS space.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
As a Blackboard administrator this patent disturbs me. The level of support that this company provides is poor on most occasions and for them to be able to limit any choice I have to use an alternative, esp. an Open Source option like Moodle, is bad for my school. I have a feeling this patent will not stand.
From the article's listing of the summary of the patent:
"For example, a lawyer may create a course in patent law online..."
I think the lawyer will have to learn patent law before he can be sure he can do this...
What a totally dumb patent - a complete and utter joke. In a past programming life I was working on systems similar to this long before Blackboard had even set themselves up as a business.
I really hope this patent is overthrown as the nonsense it truly is. More importantly, I hope this backfires badly on Blackboard and they end up going out of business.
Is there anyone here on the Sakai team, or other Sakai users who can shed some light on this issue?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
They are following Bush's mandate to destroy public education.
...in Guelph Canada. I'm typing this in a session about the new features in 8.1 :)
:)
The CEO of D2L, John Baker, wrote this LMS while a grad student enrolled at the University of Guelph in Ontario Canada. The facts scream "prior art" and Blackboard really has no case IMHO. I think the strategy here, as John put it, is to sue D2L to a point where it'd be in D2L's best interest to avoid expensive litigation and just get taken over by Blackboard. The hidden backstory here is that Blackboard wants so badly to take over D2L but D2L doesn't want any part of that. So Blackboard takes the other, more scenic route: sue them into oblivion.
I can almost guarantee that Blackboard will lose this suit. The fact that D2L existed before Blackboard was even a gleam in the eye of its writer is 98% of the case.
In any way, John was so confident about his ability to win this suit he gave us all extra drink tickets!
"This food is problematic."
Schools are the worst. It's like a suck contest. Blackboard sucks but it took tons of sucky college IT departments to make them so popular in spite of their suckiness. I recently spent several weeks working on a proposal to improve a local university's web presence and I was astounded at what a mess they had. IT was like a huge collection of buggy software with no coherent interface. So we spent >$40K coming up with a proposal/bid only to have them say, "thanks for the bluprint, I guess we'll do it ourselves". Right, whatever.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
To shed some light on the decision to file in Texas. The East Texas Court has been handling patent suit for software and the like for many years. It has become a hub for these cases. I guess because we don't have anything else to do.
Blackboard and WebCT are consolidating the educational "on-line" learning software market and this is VERY bad for open source. Neither of these systems is at all friendly to Linux; I have to use them as an on-line professor. They don't work with Firefox, they don't work with Konqueror. The systems themselves are terribly complex and non-intuitive.
If this sounds somewhat like a rant- I encourage you to try either of these systems. I believe you'll come away just as frustrated. The notion of these systems gaining, or even trying to gain a stranglehold is very depressing.
I hope that not only are these patents denied but that Blackboard and WebCT get tied up in litigation until they go Chapter 11. If any market should be supportive of Open Source, I think the on-line learning marketplace is a natural. Having Blackboard and WebCT dominate is not good for us.
... This way no one else can ever... EVER ... build another interface that bad again!
Seriously, their admin interface is one of the most horrible I have ever come across.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The astrology one is actually kind of fun reading :
Though since it is little more than mathematical formulae :
it would seem by any reasonable definition unpatentable.And the "interacting with your computer" one looks like a description of those labelled input pads people used to use, so the prior art looks strong on that as well.
The fact that D2L existed before Blackboard was even a gleam in the eye of its writer is 98% of the case.
As much as I'd like to believe this, 98% percent of the case is who can throw more money at it. I hope D2L is passing the hat around at the user's conference, because they are going to need a big pile of cash if they want to survive a patent-infringement suit.
I also hope that they're privately held; an infringement suit -- even a baseless one -- would be a nice way of driving the share price down low enough to make a hostile takeover feasible.
Just remember, when the RIM/NTP suit started, a lot of people said that was baseless, too. How did that end up? $680M, and the threat of injunctions? Facts are basically irrelevant in cases like this, it's the arguments that matter, and how you make them. A skilled lawyer can drag even the most lopsided, painfully obvious case out forever, in order to run the would-be winners into the ground financially.
It sounds like D2L is whistling through the graveyard; I wouldn't be so confident if I were them right now.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Blackboard should be shunned and loathed (most educators I know who use it and who have any sense loathe it already - it seems to be beloved more of administrators).
I only use blackboard as a way to collect and return assignments. It is awkward, painful and easy to goof with (for example, returning notes on an assignment to the wrong person). The only reason I use it is that my homebrew version which used a web interface and Postgresql and which was very hard indeed to goof with, was considered arcane by the students.
I can only hope that this does to Blackboard what the SCO suit did to them - but I am far from optimistic.
Most of the claims in Blackboard's patent are for concepts many LMSes had at the time (assignments, tests, lectures, grading, announcements, login, discussion area, chat). I was working with a competitive company at the time the patent was filed. The system we worked on was already in use by many colleges on the West Coast, with most of the features listed by June 30th, 2000, so most of the claims can be shown to be prior art.
This patent will not matter much. I don't see any particular reason to worry about it and here's why (IANAL!):
1. The patent relies on 44 claims, most of which can easily be shown to be prior art. (Ironically, WebCT, which was bought out by BlackBoard might be used as a counterexample of prior art).
3. To violate the Patent you would have to be substantially equivalent. Essentially this means someone would have to substantially rely on Blackboard's look and feel for providing LMS services.
4. The patent heavily relies on the concept of "files" - like our old system, which used flat files for information management (no, we did not and could not develop for the then popular (1998-1999) Sun + Oracle combo -- too big and too expensive for us and most schools at the time). An LMS using a Relational Database may be sufficiently different enough in implementation.
5. The patent differention seems to be at this part:
"The present invention also enhances the prior art by providing a flexible infrastructure for colleges, universities, and other institutions wishing to facilitate on-line registration and tuition payment. More specifically, the present invention can accommodate different billing methods, including, but not limited to, billing on a per-credit-hour basis, and billing on a per-registrant basis."
So, unless you are looking to build a Blackboard clone using a flat-file data management system including an integrated payment system, I really don't see anything to fret about.
(Disclaimer - As I said above, I am not a lawyer, and I certainly would love to see a more sophisticated legal analysis).
Comes from my experience at school. My university uses Blackboard to administer tests and quizzes, disseminate documents, track grades, etc. The administration has made a big push to have all the faculty use it, but their has been a big push back because Blackboard has been terrible to work with.
The biggest deal has been its tendency to erase grades, lose testing results, etc. It has been a nightmare for students and teachers a like. That aside, talking with the IT administrative staff, Blackboard has a tendency to defer responsibility to other problems, even though time and time again, blame clearly falls on bugs in their software. This annoyed a lot of people, so much in fact, that the IS department faculty have started an initiative to code a new one, from scratch, in Java.
So what would Blackboard's natural response be to customers deciding that they can create their own CMS? Why not patent it? Then they're locked into using their software! May the patent Gods strike this one down quick!
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Why are they filing it in Lufkin, Texas? I grew up there...I doubt they'll find a jury they like.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
I think your institution needs to upgrade. The latest releases of Blackboard are _extremely_ firefox-friendly. The only features which didn't work with firefox in the 6.x releases, so far as I am aware, are the WYSIWYG editor (which I've never made a practice of using, preferring to write good html). All of these features are working in the current 7.x releases. I think you probably need to consult with your system administrators--a rather more limited audience than that afforded by /.--to determine what their upgrade schedule looks like.
I would also point out before this becomes a "Blackboard hates Linux" thread, that Blackboard has always released its product for Linux and I believe most of their hosting business runs on Linux as well.
-- The Sage does nothing, and nothing is left undone. --Lao Tzu
the patent only covers their incredibly ugly and hackish system.
So you know, GOOD systems can flourish
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
You can also patent mathematical algorithms too.
UK patent - GB2322704, is a patenting of the generalised radon transform.
May the Maths Be with you!
For the life of me, this is one of those patents that is so obvious and has so much prior art that is makes you think the patent office is a rubber stamp for industry. Oh wait.
TO: USPTO
FROM: Clue Stick
RE: Blackboard patent
Read this:
Online Learning Timeline
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
Reading the patent - it's clear that if an instructor set up a Yahoo group to upload files, give students access to certain file and the ability to upload their own files and communicate with each other - that it would be infringing on the patent! And yet, this has been something that we could do since the days of eGroups - can that be called prior art? Jeepers - I can see cases of prior art everywhere given the far reach of this patent!
the parent poster is actively posting exploits on his webpage and trying to break into peoples computers. fucking asshole.
Every lawsuit filed and defense against these frivolous patents is paid for you, me and every other consumer. Do you really think that the legal slush fund just popped into being? The more legal costs there are, the higher the cost of doing business, and the higher the cost of doing business, the higher the products will have to be priced to cover those costs. And that means a higher cost of living for you and me! So, there is a *HUGE* problem with the USPTO just farting out patents and letting the legal system sort it out. It's their job to ascertain the validity of patent applications and ensure that there is a minimal chance of prior art before awarding them - and that's a job that they've failed miserably at and as a direct result - we suffer! Who holds them accountable? As it stands today, patents from the USPTO hurts our life-styles rather than helps, hurts innovation rather than helps and funds an ever growing pool of patent sharks and, almost as bad - more lawyers! There should be some constitionality in there to outlaw the USPTO as it stands today!
I think blackboard is cool
I've had to interface with Blackboard before, and it's a piss poor LMS, especially if you want to get any data into or out of it without entering it all by hand.
Imagine for a moment that at the dawn of the PC era some jackass had built an OS that lost data on a regular basis, didn't run reliably and could be trusted with your information for just about as far as you could throw the computer it was running on. Then imagine that the user interface made DOS 1.0 look like Mac OS X by comparison.
Now imagine they patented "Process to control a microprocessor or other electronic device" and with the enforcement of that patent shut down Microsoft, Apple and every flavor of Unix.
That's what Blackboard is trying to do to the Learning Management System industry with this patent. One of the worst products in the market is trying to shut down everyone else with legal wrangling.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Considering in the LMS world - blackboard is barely a blip:
I am sure that companies like IBM, SumTotal Systems, Plateau, Saba, Oracle (iLearning), and Learn.com will have plenty to say about it. Especially since several of these companies (or generally pieces of these companies - since they tend to merge a lot in the LMS world) have had working LMS systems for far longer than Blackboard has been in existence.
Hell, when SumTotal Systems acquired Pathlore Software (which is all the way from Goul - they inherited more than 20 years worth of LMS code... we are talking mainframe days here - and I hear that a lot of that stuff is still running. Prior art abounds... this is a horrible patent anyway.
SCO filed the lawsuits in Utah, where they had the best chance of winning.
SCO filed the lawsuits (IBM & Novell, the AutoZone & DaimlerChrysler suits were filed elsewhere) in Utah because SCO is based in Utah. Also, SCO is based in Lindon, Utah, not Salt Lake City so I'm not sure how SLC is then associated with SCO - maybe because the court is located in SLC?
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
What you forget is that RIM broke the first rule of lawsuits: Don't piss off the judge.
Had the judge not already been so against them, he might have listened as the USPTO tossed out NTP's patents...
As much as I'd like to believe this, 98% percent of the case is who can throw more money at it.
I'm as cynical as the next guy, but honestly, the system isn't that corrupt. If it were, the US would look more like Mexico or an African country.
"But the US is as corrupt as an African country!" - no it isn't. Rhetoric isn't evidence. Believing it in the face of all evidence to the contrary is not wisdom. "Rampant corruption around every corner" and "world's largest economy" do not go together.
It is still true that this can be expensive, but prior art is a damn good defense if you can show it, and all that's left is for Blackboard to wrangle about whether something really is prior art, which still puts them in the position of limiting their own patent, even if they get to keep it. And patent holders are afraid of prior art claims because they can lose the entire patent, not just the case.
If they have prior art, I wouldn't be at all surprised Blackboard starts going after other people instead. Although, they were by no means the first to get into this domain and I bet they find a lot of people have prior art. I know the LCMS I've worked on, right around the time of filing, LON-CAPA, had a lot of those things already, in many cases superior to what was being patented. (LON-CAPA is the stereo-typical open-source project, positively dripping with power but still a little weak on the user-interface side.)
Zope Corp used to have Zope4Edu, and Duke University was helping with it. Now it's not listed as a product on zope.com, but it is mentioned in their "about" page. Anyone have experience with it? Wonder if BB would sue them.
Your IS department is on crack. There are so many already-open-source LCMSs that it's like writing your own text editor... stop already and start with something else. We don't need another half-assed text editor, we don't need another half-assed web framework, we don't need another half-assed MP3 player, and we don't need another half-assed LCMS.
Disclaimer: I've worked on LON-CAPA, but I mean that in general. Pick up one of the existing ones and extend it. I don't know if any are in Java, but I wouldn't be surprised, and given the bonus of picking up megabytes of tested, documented, working code, it'd be worth a language switch anyhow.
Why? It's not like there aren't already a lot of highly capable Open Source LMSs out there, some are even written in Java.
Depending on your needs, any of these could work fine. We've been running on Dokeos for the past three years, and although our needs aren't high it's worked quite well.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
And to think I just ran into someone who is a rising start at Blackboard as a project manager.
Why would a company that already controls the biggest share of the university market seek to eliminate the small players with an expensive patent suit. They already aquired their biggest competitor so its basically just them and some smaller companies and schools that choose to build their own. They also have yet to attempt to compete in the highschool market. This lawsuit is a distraction at best. Patents are not for enforcing, they are for defending, especially vague ones that cover an entire business sector like this.
Blackboard DOES hate Linux. Whatever your experience with Blackboard 7, Blackboard itself does not agree:
s er_requirements.pdf
http://library.blackboard.com/docs/bbas_r7_0_brow
NB: NO mention of Linux. Do you really want to use Firefox 1.0? I mean is it even available? I don't see Konqueror anywhere. There's NO reason why every box in that chart shouldn't be checked that I can see. Keeping the system simple and usable would avoid the problems.
Okay, if you're referring to SCO, that's based in Lindon, Utah - about 40 miles south of Salt Lake City. Besides which, there are literally hundreds of technology/web companies (such as Novell, many game companies, Overstock.com) in the area so please don't coin a phrase that blankets the whole area in the dark shroud of SCO.
Documentation aside, I use blackboard with Linux every day and it works flawlessly. You're setting up a straw man here. Clearly it's not reasonable for a company to expend the resources to validate their software with a browser that isn't going to be a factor for 95% of their users. This is born out by the fact that they do validate for Mac OS. MacOS has a higher adoption rate in their market, so naturally, it makes business sense for them to expend those resources in that direction. If you think that validation happens for free, you need to spend some time in a software development house. The fact that it isn't on a supported list doesn't indicate "hate" any more than the fact that they don't list valid Solaris browsers indicates that they "hate" Solaris (which they also offer the product for). As for what you can see, clearly that field of vision is restricted by an interesting form of myopia.
-- The Sage does nothing, and nothing is left undone. --Lao Tzu
..a government employee, getting a reasonably good salary, full complete benefits, something like 13 paid holidays PLUS vacation PLUS 1 for 1 bank account "sharing" PLUS a pension PLUS another social security pension signed off on that mofo as being cool and patentable.
The system is broken beyond repair. You can go right down the list of everything the feds do and it is (for the most part, odd exceptions here and there) corrupt, inefficient, stupid, redundant, harmful, ignorant, retarded and just plain vanilla wrong. The federal government runs itself as an armed bully busywork jobs program syndicate that insists you play ball with stupidity and crime and corruption and all of them got their hands out for bribes. And now clearly they have gone WAY out of their way to bork the vote, meaning any so called last ditch "civilian" oversight has been tossed out the window. And I sure ain't seeing any mass protests from government workers over the vote being hijacked. That means, they don't care, because they got theirs and screw you, civilian.
Tearing that sucker down and doing an eXtreme makeover is the only solution to patent and copyright bullshit, wars based on lies and "end times" scenarios, sweetheart deals, selling off the airwaves to corrupt monopolists and broadcasting cartels, lobbying corruption (let's just call campaign contributions bribes and be done with it), double dipping (fscking gov employees can have TWO freakin "careers" and get full double pensions), walmart and other companies like that being classed as "small business" for government busywork contracts, propoganda and mass social conditioning spewed forth as "education", foreign policy dictated by the energy and arms transnationals with a little "small mid east nation" blackmail and bribery action,, and so on and so forth. Freakin list would be as large as the manhattan phone book just to hit the high points on "wrongness".
Any single small nitpicky thing would be that, small and nitpicky, probably fixable, but taken as a whole...nuts.. look around.it's chronically broken. There is more broken than not, that is usually the sign for the rubbish heap. It's crap, trash, garbage, the federal government is pure grade A US prime junk. There might be some salvageable scraps,but that's it. Nice experiment, but failed the stupidity and greed test badly. The best thing that could happen for the US people-the non federally employed people-is a direct asteroid strike on DC.
I think the biggest problems with patents today (at least in the U.S.) is that more and more of the high-tech companies are *requiring* their employees to submit a number of patent applications (to the company's patent selection office) each year or risk having their employment terminated. At the company I was previously employed at, they decided in 2002 that all employees of at least my grade were required to file 2 or more patent applications a year. Failure to do so meant the employee was ineligible for promotions (and possibly fired at the annual review) and impacted the potential bonus. If a submission was accepted by the company's patent selection office and later approved by the USPTO, there was supposedly a nice little windfall bonus package, but I quit before I ever saw one make it that far.
Oh My...
I have been running a small, start-up business called Infinience which will specialize in content management applications, and my debut program is called Student Manager, which is a content management application designed for students... I wonder how long before Blackboard tries to contact me...
Student Manager - Take control of your education!
I have a friend that started working for the USPTO a few months ago. I showed that person the link and got a little bit of information about how things happen there:
b lackboard_patents_the_lms
;)
:P
Me: http://mfeldstein.com/index.php/weblog/permalink/
your people are being dumb there
Them: yeah well some people screw up
examiners do it just as much as anyone else
Me: doesn't anyone double-check these things though?
Them: infact i think we do it less, but it's just more public
well, we have a production goal
and the yare trying to make "quality" but however when you're under the pressure of being fired if you don't get your count, you might mess up
but then again, they might just be stupid
Me: so after someone researches it and decides it's ok to grant does someone else review that or after 1 pass it gets accepted?
Them: not if you're a primary examiner, then you sign your own cases
Me: that's scary
Them: yeah, as a primary sometimes you have to do a case a day
which makes it rough
Me: how many do u have to do now?
Them: 3-4 every 2 weeks
but i'm only doing 2-ish
b/c i've only been examining for 2 months
Me: and if u don't get them done then your boss gets on your case?
Them: well, we are on a one year probationary period...if i don't make it with in a year then we might get fired
----
Sounds like a high-pressure job, especially the longer you've been there. There are probably some burn-out examiners that just let things slip through now and again (which is pretty evident by what's been coming out of there).
Netcraft says BB is using Linux on their site? hmmm...
Does that mean that Moodle will have some protection under the GPL? No. Anyone may run Linux, even the Devil's spawn. Has anyone scanned BB software for strings of GPL software? If there are, BB should not be charging for licences and definitely not suing people over it.
The claims of the patent seem very obvious. What was USPTO thinking? Maybe they were not thinking but just applying the rubber stamp. BB might as well have a patent for all formal education...
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
I took a course using WebCT last year:www.WebCT.com
I prefer Moodle, which I use in my teaching.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
Learnframe http://www.learnframe.com/ sold a comercial LMS for YEARS before Blackboard's patent application! It was a decent LMS and was gaining in popularity, until their management destroyed the company financially and quit paying everyone, including me one of their developers. (unexplicedly they manage to keep their website up and running even though they owe former customers and employees millions!)
What is suprising to me about this patent is that Learnframe itself tried to patent one of it's "proprietary methods" [HA!] for connecting to 3rd party courseware and was rejected. So why did the USPTO allow another company to patent the entire thing?!
And, as far as the Salt Lake City thing goes, Learnframe has it's offices in Draper, Utah, half way between SLC and Lindens, SCO!
UICU did this over 30 years ago. viz. TUTOR (and dec created DAL based on TUTOR).
There were some good multiplayer geographically distributed games written in TUTOR in the 70's; empire, dnd, et. al.
I would NOT recommend upgrading to Blackboard 7.1 as there are NUMEROUS significant problems with it. Some of the problems include quizzes that require essays and/or short answers (the answers disappear); and problem with the inability by some users to read replies in the discussion board. Before you upgrade, take a look at all the known issues and you might not be so quick to do so.
We upgraded just before our summer sessions and have deeply regretted it, but because the upgrade required changes in our databases, we could not roll back. We do not use Blackboard as heavily with our summer courses and I'm dreading the fall.
In addition to using open source courseware such as Moodle, a number of teachers and administrators have been switching to wiki platforms like PBwiki and Wikispaces as a very lightweight replacement for heavy-handed, thickly-structured courseware. Disclaimer: I'm the founder of PBwiki. But I can tell you, we have tens of thousands of educational wikis set up with us, many of which are being used instead of Blackboard, even in districts where Blackboard has been paid for. PBwiki is proudly patent free; we'll compete on merit, thank you. :)
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
- Neither of these systems is at all friendly to Linux -
As a Linux admin using Blackboard, I can tell you that this far from the truth. I run Blackboard and I can tell you in general it runs very smoothly. The major issues I have revolve around the initial hardware specs than anything else. There are a few issues (which can be foun on their website) but the knowledge base and their TSMs seem to have a work around for most of them.
The big issue actually being the assessments losing answers has a work around with removing multiple attempts and I have been told by support that they will be releasing a fix for this issue.
All in all, I find that the latest version (7.1) is very Firefox friendly and even works well on Safari. I actually feel that it is best served by Firefox than by IE.
-- Too Lazy to sign up for an account.
When I was first appointed as a faculty member around 1996 I immediately started using web pages with my classes. Many of my pages had alot of the features that Blackboard now claim to have a patent upon (discussion forums, etc.). I have even published an academic paper on this stuff, as I was an 'early adopter'.
Eventually, my school bought into the Blackboard thing. I refused to join in, because my web pages provided all the functionality I needed, without needing the huge computational overhead and without the security concerns. The necessity of JavaScript is a particular concern. Then Blackboard made a big marketing move: we had to sign up for an expensive new version. As a State school, we could not afford it, so we had to quit Blackboard. We moved to Moodle.
The move to Moodle produced a whole new pile of problems. It seemed that some faculty, having learned how to do things with Blackboard, appeared incapable of learning Moodle! They bitched and complained. One idiot from the English dept. even suggested in our Faculty Senate that we should try and develop a Moodle interface that emulated Blackboard! Fortunately, common sense prevailed and this was not approved.
However, here is the problem: techno-phobic faculty members are now hooked on Blackboard. In our case, they are being forced to wean themselves to Moodle. All this being said, much or most of the functionality available with these systems can be provided in plain HTML, with a few tricks, to enable passwords and the like. With good modern HTML Editors (like Nvu), once these are set up correctly, plain web pages can be created without the user realising that they are doing anything too much different from writing an MS-Turd document. However, it seems impossible for me to convince other faculty to do this. We all have PhDs, so at least some of us should be smart. After all, my 11 year old daughter can make web pages! Yet, the luddites still abound. These are the people Blackboard are relying upon to make them their millions. I think that it is just sad.
Seems to me the biggest loser here could be the most popular open source LMS -- Moodle. It's hard for me to feel sympathy for them given the discussions below that are less than a month old. If Blackboard is a "bad guy" here, how is Moodle any better?
r owse_thread/thread/60b321aba956fcdd/c634155509923a cb?lnk=raot/
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=48528/
and here:
http://groups.google.com.br/group/sf-uk-discuss/b
What's the problem with the "Method for exercising a cat" patent that everyone always brings up? I see that it was filed for in 1993. Was there some prior art before 1993 that described harrassing cats with laser pointers?
Maybe someone with more legal experience can show me what's so silly about this patent.
Validation should happen for almost free. A good software test involves some sort of input faking and screen scraping, so as not to interfere with the running software on the machine. As such, it should be pretty simple to rerun the test on any other platform. If it's not key-for-key identical, you've failed anyways. Developing the test costs, rerunning it should happen in an automated fashion for every check-in to cvs and simply mail results to the developer.
Seriously, browser based stuff should run on almost anything, and should be tested on it. The whole point is to remove the client-system from the usage requirements.
Seems like more proof that the company is a Rambus. All patents, no solid, useful, inovative products.
- WNight
AFAIK back when my local uni switched to WebCT (huge and expensive mistake that they are still failing to clean up) it was done so with sweeteners by Microsoft. This is, of course, hearsay which is the best you'll ever get from uni students and the odd IT department contact. So as far as I'm aware WebCT and Microsoft were in bed together or partly owned or similar at some point in the past.
I ate your fish.
It does suck. Thankfully our Univ switched to D2L this year. Waaaay better!
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
OT: about your signature - for easy (i.e. Windows install shield style) installs, Linux already has Autopackage. I use it for Oolite. Works very well. Quite a few projects are now using it for distro-independent installers.
http://autopackage.org/
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Why do majority of the people on this earth pay to use windows when you can get linux/unix for free?
http://www.boycottblackboard.org/ This might turn out to be an expensive battle for Blackboard!
Even worse -- they are making their millions off of Open Source technologies but want to limit the ability for others to do so! What a crock of shiite --
Since we're dealing with grades and other personal information the first thing I set about was running it over SSL.
Heh. Interesting. At my Place O' Employ we use WebCT (now, of course, all owned by the same company) and their response to me when I wanted to run it behind SSL as well, starting with Campus Edition. Hello?? FERPA, anyone?
As for prior art, I can say that I worked on the programming team for an LMS, complete with roles (people having different roles in different classes) from 1995.
However, this ridiculous patent business and the subsequent D2L lawsuit make me sick:
- the patent itself is absurd and I can't see it not being revoked
- Blackboard's actions have caused serious irrepairable damage to the company, further alineating potential customers, disgruntled WebCT clients and even serious affecting their relationship with most existing customers.
- Instead of trying to earn the trust of the industry, after the WebCT buyout, and showing that they are a good company, they are showing a greedy and disgusting face, confirming that they just might be that evil bully monopolistic company that many open-source brain-washed and competing products people have been claiming Blackboard is or could be.
- Blackboard has embarrased all existing customers and put them in an ackward and very negative position. This will hurt Blackboard big time in the not-to-distant future.
- Blackboard has shown that they will use whatever means available to dominiate the market, instead of concentrating in wining the business on their good technology and the real lower cost of ownership and the pedagogical value Blackboard bring to educational institutions. They should invest in their technological talent and good product line, and not in lawsuits and ludicrous ill-awarded patents.
- When is Blackboard going to learn and understand how the educational industry and community is? How could a bunch of very smart Blackboard executives have not foreseen the backslash? How could they not see that this is not the way we like to do business nor the way we like to pick our software suppliers, vendors and partners?
Blackboard should seriously consider scrapping this whole embarrasing action, the stupidest thing they have ever done, fire those responsible for aggitating the company into pursuit this dementia and appologize to the entire educational community.I wish they could be severly punished for this action, but still be given one more opportunity to survive as a company.As a longtime Blackboard customer and supporter, I am truly angry and disappointed.
not a patent issue. It's very similar (almost exactly) to Linus' ownership of the Linux trademark.
Very few people would have a problem with Blackboard suing Desire2Learn if D2L had been saying it was 'powered by Blackboard'.