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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.
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.
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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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 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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