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Blackboard's "Pledge" Not to Sue Open Source Software
Another anonymous reader writes with a link to the Inside Higher Education site. Those folks are reporting on Blackboard's 'pledge' not to sue open source projects used by universities and colleges. The Blackboard patent on educational groupware filed last year has come under a lot of fire, with many organizations simply seeking an open-source alternative. This newest peace offering to higher education groups has the Sakai open source consortium more than a little bit nervous. If Blackboard meant to set people at ease, all it has managed to do was confirm to onlookers that it 'wants to keep its legal options open.' Blackboard insists that this new pledge affords universities a number of legal privileges, and is designed to make educators 'sleep easy at night.' Somehow, very few people seem reassured. Update: 02/02 17:34 GMT by Z : Bad first link fixed.
The first link goes to a Scoble blog entry about completely different things...
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
for soon to be non existent patent infringements
I, for one, welcome our Blackboard overlords.
Even with all good intentions in mind, all pleadges/promises will go out the windows when somebody buys the company.
Either donate the patent to OSDL patent commons project or start enforcing it.
(If you don't enforce now it makes it harder to enforce it later when greed kicks in.)
Aren't SW patent wonderful?
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
ZDNet has also covered the story.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Well, it would be one thing if blackboard actually had something to offer, but unfortunately in comparison with other open source (or web apps brewed within the edu) there really isn't much contrast. Meaning, if Blackboard had some desirable features that would be worth paying for, it would be more tempting to purchase it, obviously. Unfortunately, every feature they currently offer can be coded internally rather easily (my school proves this quite well), or it can be added in by some other module - for instance a php nuke forum.
Maybe in realizing this - but realizing the latter point that they would be competing against their own potential customers decided it would just be really bad PR.
The one perspective that I havent seen in this whole debate is that BB is just trying to cover its ass on a legal basis. Think about it. Your a BB exec and you see many similar programs appearing and you have no legal claim to the technology. What would happen if someone built a very similar program and grabbed the copyright. They could then Sue BB for many monies and possibly take over. And I truly believe that they intend to honor there promise of not suing freeware/OSS system providers, clear up until they are "under new management"
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
...I will in return "Pledge" not to sue Blackboard.
In spite of the fact that it claims to be legally binding, irrevocable and worldwide in scope I don't see anything that would actually make it so. You just have a promise that they won't revoke
If you think deeply enough, you will have no single direction for your outrage.
See an insecurity in their systems? They'll sue you to shut you up about it.
o rg/acidus/campuswide/index.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20050404014123/se2600.
If you want to start a war with someone, first thing you should do is assure the opposite side of your eternal love and cooperation. Then, when the opposite side is all calmed down and relaxed hit them with the biggest hammer you've got and aim right for the head.
You can't handle the truth.
Blackboard to try to keep some face. The Blackboard product heavily utilizes "building blocks" (assuming you have the enterprise version), many of which are open source. If Blackboard is benefiting from open source, attacking open source products may kill or slow down the inovation that comes from the building blocks...
Additionally, I think this is an attempt to try to placate those who are shouting prior art and want to go after the patent and invalidate it... The reasoning might go like, "If they aren't going after sakai or moodle, i don't really care if they have the patent." That is how I see the real purpose of this move... It seems fairly shrewd. Hopefuly higher ed will continue to go after them and educause will keep the pressure up. BTW, there is a joint statement from educause and sakai (PDF) on educause's website. (Here is the statement on sakai's page.)
--JSIf you are never moderated, do you really exist?
If you look at this offer as a game of chess, they are sacrificing a small market segment usually served with discounted prices. As a telling example, most sales to the education industry are very inexpensive compared to the prices real companies and people pay. The Microsoft office suite, as an example, is discounted to under 150USD, while the average person can pay much, much more.
The leverage this gives a company is incredible! Educators are always looking for stuff on the cheap, and the idea that a 150 software package translates into hundreds more of sales at the full price doesn't occur to them. So, they merrily specify it, and that generates a tremendous demand for later sales.
Similarly, by "protecting" open source in an educational context, they are able to copy features that would be built in by the community. Now, the market demands are already known, and just need to be branded and productized.
The real payoff for them is business; both as a part of infrastructure, and as a collaberation tool. Here the price for such tools can be quite high (about 10K USD).
Don't take the cheese, it's on a trap.
This is progress?
I'm going to say, as a college student, blackboard sucks. Only about 15% of my teachers bother using it, and even among that percent, only around 50% of those who do use it know how. I can hardly use the messy interface of this horrible little system. Honestly, if I had a class, I'd just pop-up an invision or phpbb forum. I've only seen the "submit homework" feature used once. Having a place to get your syllabus is nice and all, but in the end all our teachers have free web space they hardly use anyways.
The only decent thing blackboard does is connect to our school's account systems so we have 1 account for 5 different systems (library, e-mail, direct payments and some other system too). And personally I see that as a security risk if anything...
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
I pledge, solemnly, to only sue people with deep pockets.
Do you feel better now?
Glancing at the patent, there are two key pieces. There's a piece that talks about having a role based system where there are specifically teacher, student, and administrator roles. There's also a piece that talks about how files would be managed in that environment, permitting uploads, role based access, etc.
I wrote a system in 1997, predating this by at least three years that did pretty much what they are saying (your patent lawyer mileage may vary). My system was a modification of an existing open source forum product that created the ability for Teachers to come in and create classrooms that students could subscribe to. Any person could be a teacher by creating a classroom, but within the context of a given classroom there was a distinct role of teacher and student.
They filed their patent in 2000. They are at least three years too late. I also know that there was other software out at the time that provided similar capabilities because, to some extent, I was competing with those products at the time.
So I call BS on their patent.
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Come by the Albuquerque Moodle Moot on Feb 16 to see how UCLA, Intel, The Open University, The Carnegie Foundation, etc. are using Moodle.
Moodle is simply the most flexible mature LMS out there, with a wide range of completely different formats for supporting different pedagogies built in, and it's relatively easy to build new interfaces to meet the specific goals of a particular institution.
For some of the best commentary on the Blackboard patent issue, see Al Essa.
My favorite is when it tells me I got 11.2 points out of a maximum of 10, and the class average was 13. No wonder why my GPA is so bad.
Mr. Small (a lawyer for blackboard) and Eben Moglen had a discussion about the patent in question and the convenant not to sue free software at a recent Sakai conference (search for the audio recording. It's worth having a listen to see how awful Blackboard really is). Small made it clear that they promised not to sue free software, using the argument that no one was making money from it (i.e. they won't sue a charity because it makes the look bad). It was implied^ however, that you would indeed be sued if you supported free software financially. For example, if you made a business that sold the software, provided support services, or funded development (It would sue a RedHat-like company for example). The covenant not to sue is then essentially worthless to important groups like *Universities* who would presumably be very eager to support development of free (price+freedom) alternatives to the POS that is Webct. Further, schools won't see free software solutions as a viable alternative if there is no available enterprise (commercial) support services. ^ Or maybe stated outright, I can't remember.
If you compare the list of patents that Bb has filed for (particularly the ones that they have filed in the last few months) to the list that they agree not to assert against Open Source, there's a significant gap. Here's a list of current pending patents attributed to Blackboard and/or its employees:
If Bb is really serious about dealing with the community in good faith, then why is it only talking about the patent applications that have already been widely publicized?
It's like patenting using a car to get groceries.
Blackboard got their patent and immediately sued Desire2learn, a small outfit in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. They aren't big and can't afford much of a legal battle. IMHO, they would have been forced to settle and that would have created some kind of precedent. Eban Moglen and co. at the Software Freedom Law Center did two things. They submitted a brief to the judge in the Desire2learn case (which has Desire2learn's nose out of joint according to an article in the KW Record.) They also asked the Patent Office to review Blackboard's patent. The Patent Office has agreed to review the patents. If the patents are found to be bogus then the promise not to sue anyone is moot. Given the amount of prior art that people have turned up, it is likely that Blackboard's patent will be pitched out.
Anyway, what Blackboard's promise may do is remove the rationale for the SFLC to intervene in the Desire2learn case. In that case, Blackboard could win the case because they have deeper pockets and because even a bogus patent can get an injunction. RIM (makers of the Blackberry) had to settle with NTP even though NTP's patents are likely to be thrown out because, if they didn't settle, the judge was going to issue an injunction that would have prevented them from doing business in the US.
Bottom line: I think it's a legal trick to get Eban Moglen off their case. (Good luck dudes)
There are links to the prior art collections on the Desire2learn wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire2Learn
They could put a term in their license that states they'll pay back the price of the software if Blackboard sues open-source software or offers a cease/desist order. Then Blackboard's execs will know that if they do go back on their word, they'll have a lot of money to lose!
A school's choices will be between an open source project or one commercial vendor. The existing commercial vendors will not invest in online education software, and no new entrants will be able to raise investment funding. And Educause and open source projects will lose commercial partners as they move on to find a market that will support them.
I'm enrolled in the PA Cyber Charter School, who uses blackboard. The web interface is less than elegant and is extremely buggy. In testing mode, sometimes questions are marked wrong when right or right when wrong, or there's two identical answers (in which case, the correct answer is one of the two, but only one of the two will be accepted as right).
If anyone is thinking of using blackboard for a startup, beat them down with a steel baseball bat and hire them a LAMPS expert to write their own version.
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
Instead of storing your data in a file or plurality of files, store it in a big ol' relational database.
It doesn't quite matter whether I'm actually right or not. If I was going to start up a company to develop software in that market, I'd now have to either pay a royalty to blackboard, or take my chances in court. One bright side is that a recent supreme court ruling established that you can sue blackboard beforehand to get a judgment on the validity of their patent. But still that will cost quite a bit of money.
That's the problem is that the patent system heavily favors the people that get the patent, whether it's valid or not.
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From BB's FAQ:
My company would like to incorporate Open Source Software into our proprietary software (e.g., include the Sakai Course Management System as part of a commercially-licensed software package). We won't be charging for the portion that contains the Open Source Software but will be charging for our proprietary portion. Is my company covered by this pledge?
No. To the extent that any proprietary software is Bundled with the Open Source Software, this pledge would not apply. However, if your customers wish to supplement or enhance your proprietary product with Open Source Software which is not Bundled by you, that would be covered. Blackboard believes this pledge provides a strong incentive for developers to continue building extensions to proprietary solutions as well as to enhance standards such as those promulgated by IMS, while allowing schools to accomplish all of its information technology goals.
Compare that with:
Oracle and Unicon, Inc. Unveil Plans to Create Next-Generation Academic Enterprise Environment
Then http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=ORCL&d=t
vs.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=bbbb
Cage match!
When the country falls into chaos, politicians talk about 'patriotism'. Lao-Tzu
I always liked the acronym LEIA, Learning Environment Independent Architecture (LEIA), Independent as in "Open Standards, Open Source, Open Content, Open Learning" always free from authoritarian control or domination by someone or anything. [AKA: Learning-governed by Reality, Facts, Science, Math, Humanities, Arts/Cultures ...]
.... Learning tainted by religious, business, and/or political greed, hypocrisy, dogma, fraud ... is a lie with trivial value to humanity or any nation/culture including US & EU.
Learning should not be controlled by government, politics, corporations, plutocrats, revisionist, religious-dogmatist
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
BLACKBOARD MAKES A PLEDGE
a rd
Under fire in patent dispute, software giant says it won't sue
open source providers. Has the company gone far enough to
satisfy its critics?
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/02/blackbo
When I was in school, we had a small team which developed, tested, and distributed educational groupware. According to our director who went to collect awards for the good work, the Blackboard people were dumbfounded when he told them that his team was basically a group of sub-$10/hr undergrads plus a few grad students from the biology and sociology depts. Other schools actually offered to buy our software over Blackboards, from what I've heard.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Gotta be better the POS WebCT stuff we're using now.
As someone who was once forced to use WebCT, I can say, without reservations, that having homework assignments transmitted into your brain by having a midget repeatedly hammer Morse Code messages on a rusty screwdriver in your eye socket, would be a far preferable system, and probably more user friendly.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
A verbal contract is still a contract, and since it's in a press release it could likely be held as a contract as well. Whether it is specific to a given company or global in scope should not matter.
So if BB decide to see an OSS project, then the OSS project could likely hit them with "breach of contract"
But at least in one case, very similar to Blackboard's situation (with prior art), Microsoft actually did the right thing. In their new version of Visual Studio, they had something called "Object Bench", and BlueJ developer, at first interested to see what Microsoft was doing, after exploring the screens a bit, realized it was very similar to BlueJ - a little _too_ similar, in fact! Worse, they were filing a patent!
Fortunately, MSFT has since apologized.
I've only had 1 class out of 10 that used WebCT ever use this online learning stuff effectively. The interface buttons randomly change places on the screen as you try to navigate, it's hard to find updates/new material, and the service, at least at my university, has all sorts of crashes and bugs that lots of people, not just me, experience, including; trouble uploading material, trouble with online quizzes being available to the right people, and the whole system being unavailable for hours at a time do to reboots and "system updates."
Why can't teachers just use blogs for classes? New assignment out today?-post a short notice on the class blog. New Lab schedule?-post it on the blog. It would be a much more effective way to disseminate information to students in a class than the nightmare of current online learning groupware or whatever you want to call it. Heck, an RSS feed of each class would be ideal. Every student is automatically sent updates for each class as they're issued, instead of the current wading through all the junk on WebCT hoping to find the new assignment, syllabus, or schedule.
I work for a university on the east coast, we evaluated Blackboard, and eventually chose Sakai as our LMS.
Blackboard, even in its latest version was buggy and temperamental, and that was just in the sales demo. We contacted neighboring universities, and found the same basic consensus that we had just from that Sales call, that the product was less then stellar, and combined with the high 6 figure price tag for our needs, far from worth the cost.
Sakai so far, its only been a few months, has been a breeze to work with, and the open source community behind it is one of the most helpful I've ever met.
I hope Blackboard is able to revamp their product, as I am a fan of competition on all sides, and think that they could learn a lot from the educational open source environment, instead of being rather pig-headish about how they run things.
NETg had a webbased learning management system in 1997, the year blackboard was founded. It also had a LAN-based elearning delivery system as early as 1991.
There is a preponderance of prior examples of the patent in question to make it almost certainly invalid.
What do you say, guys? Should we pledge not to sue them in return?
No wait, that'd be really condescending.
For Blackboard to even have applied for these patents is evil and possibly fraudulent. Their pledge provides no security to anyone, and more looks like an attempt to give them some legal and PR breathing room. I hope they'll get sued into oblivion.
Blackboard insists that this new pledge affords universities a number of legal privileges, and is designed to make educators 'sleep easy at night.' Somehow, very few people seem reassured.
There is absolutely no cause for concern. The wings are not on fire.
Loose lips lose spit.
I'm glad they're doing this. Patent lawsuits could really undermine much of "the pioneering work being done by educators in the e-learning 2.0 space." Whatever that means.
Maybe not
The priority date is from a 1999 application, so by US rules on priority (IIRC) the invention could have been first made public in '98. It may have been invented much sooner but not have been evidenced to have been created any sooner.
Anyhow, the first claim (unamended in the '138 application) reads:
+++
1. A course-based system for providing to an educational community of users access to a plurality of online courses, comprising: a) a plurality of user computers, with each user computer being associated with a user of the system and with each user being capable of having predefined characteristics indicative of multiple predetermined roles in the system, each role providing a level of access to a plurality of data files associated with a particular course and a level of control over the data files associated with the course with the multiple predetermined user roles comprising at least two user's predetermined roles selected from the group consisting of a student role in one or more course associated with a student user, an instructor role in one or more courses associated with an instructor user and an administrator role associated with an administrator user, and b) a server computer in communication with each of the user computers over a network, the server computer comprising: means for storing a plurality of data files associated with a course, means for assigning a level of access to and control of each data file based on a user of the system's predetermined role in a course; means for determining whether access to a data file associated with the course is authorized; means for allowing access to and control of the data file associated with the course if authorization is granted based on the access level of the user of the system.
+++
They may have had to amend it for grant, has it been granted yet(?), in which case this may no longer bear true as to the "invention". Usually amendments take the form of including matter from subsequent claims that distinguishes the claimed invention from the "prior art" (the body of evidence presented for previous works). Reading down the claims the details are for subsequent elements of a hypertext based assessment system which includes provision of [access protected] course materials, creation of tests and marking of student tests and finally (in claim 35) to having a webpage with links to email (asynchronous) and a chat session (synchronous) [all integrated in the context of an assessment system]. From what I can recall back in 1999 when I was a 2nd year undergrad this would have been quite novel [in the vague non-patent sense].
You don't mention the taking of tests, grading of test nor the synchronous communications. As I'm assuming you were an expert in the field at the time it seems they could write claims to a novel invention based on the patent - or if they can't then someone could.
Disclaimer: I _used_to_ examine patents in the G06F classification area so I don't know anything anymore!!
Incidentally their summary of interpreting patents at http://www.blackboard.com/patent/FAQ2 is really good and should be required reading for slashdotters.
Looking at 20060168233 A1 - all but one claim has been deleted, number 47(!)
+++
47. A system for providing to a community of users access to a plurality of online courses, comprising: a server computer in communication with each of a plurality of user computers over a network, the server computer comprising: means for storing a plurality of data files associated with a course, means for assigning a level of access to and control of each data file based on a user of the system's predetermined role in a course; means for determining whether access to a data file associated with the course is authorized; means for allowing access to and control of the data file associated with the course if authorization is granted based on the access level of the user of the system; wherein each user of the system being capable of having pre