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Blackboard Wins Patent Suit Against Desire2Learn
edremy writes "Blackboard, the dominant learning management system (LMS) maker, has won its initial suit against Desire2Learn. Blackboard gets $3.1 million and can demand that Desire2Learn stop US sales. (We discussed Blackboard when the patent was issued in 2006) This blog provides background on the suit. Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn't think something this obvious could even be patented, but so far it's been a very effective weapon for Blackboard, badly hurting Desire2Learn and generating a huge amount of worry for the few remaining commercial LMSs that Blackboard has not already bought, and open source solutions such as Moodle (Blackboard's pledge not to attack such providers notwithstanding)."
....why the hell would anybody want to infringe on their patents? It's a really horrible design and interface.
I am a student at UNBC (in BC, Canada), and Blackboard is our LMS, due to the fact that Blackboard bought out WebCT recently. I have to say that as a student, marker, and Computer Helpdesk staff member, I /LOATH/ Blackboard. The system is flaky, often crashes, logs you out for no reason, refuses to load files, fails to load files, as well as a myriad of other issues.
I feel that not only is allowing a patent like this counter-productive to the advancement of the product, it also continues to add precedent that it's okay to patent stupid things and then create a monopoly. The idea behind the free market is that everyone has a fighting change to sell their product. Sure, consumers have allowed companies like Wall-Mart to take off and out-sell smaller companies, but that's the risk of doing business. Letting companies sue each other left and right is not allowing for a free market, and is in the end going to hurt consumers. For example, when Blackboard bought WebCT, they stopped supporting WebCT4 (Blackboard has released WebCT6/BCE6), despite the fact that there are many classes which are not fully compatible with the new version.
I know this isn't really relevant, but I couldn't help but take up the opportunity to badmouth Blackboard. Another point to note is that a friend of mine worked at a college in Alberta implementing the system and said it's just as ugly and trying on the server side as it is on the client side.
Then it's not an educational firm... it's educational only as a secondary, possibly accidental effect ...
Oh how sweetly naive. It's and educational firm, not an educator. Welcome to capitalism.
I have also been a blackboard admin for about five years. The above post is 100% true.
Here is a short list of Blackboard annoyances:
It produces hundreds of megabytes of absolutely useless logs every day.
These logs are basically consist of tomcat java core dumps which seemingly happen every second of the day. These java dumps are completely useless unless you are a java programmer, and even if you are a java programmer, blackboard does not provide the source to their jar files. You could probably decompile them, but who would want to given Blackboard's history of suing over IP.
The built in log archiving utility doesn't work.
With all of these goddamn logs, you would think proper log management is surely something Blackboard integrates into their product, right? Wrong. They include a nice little log file archiving utility but it contains precisely zero options on how to archive them, and it frequently fails to zero out logs, leaving you with gigabytes of log files after a short time. Many BB admins, including myself, have their own script to manage logs.
It's built primarily on Tomcat.
Everything I've ever seen that was built on Tomcat has been either unstable, dog slow, or both. One version of Blackboard shipped with a version of Tomcat that leaked threads, causing BB administrators all over the planet to have to restart the tomcat processes on their BB servers every 7-14 days.
Their support is nearly non-existent
Unless you say your server is down, support tickets generally take weeks, and in some cases months to get resolved. Simple ("non-critical") cases are all but ignored. Support reps have been known to answer with a polite equivalent of "RTFM". I was given the "RTFM" response to the case I put in regarding tomcat leaking threads. They never resolved the case. Instead I ended up monitoring threads and restarting tomcat by hand. When we updated to a new version of Blackboard the problem magically went away. I'm not completely sure, but I think Blackboard never even realized that they were shipping a buggy version of Tomcat. They accidentally fixed it by shipping a newer version in a later release.
They use incredibly inefficient stored procedures which can bring down an entire system
Most of the complex processes, like deleting entire courses or students are carried out via stored procedures in the database (BB runs on SQL Server and Oracle). In SQL server, the stored procedures are extremely inefficient and can suck up so much memory that they bring the entire system to a grinding halt. I ran across this when trying to delete a bunch of very old courses in our system. In researching the problem I read that the use of cursors was a huge no-no in SQL server (but okay in Oracle!). The stored procedure that deletes courses was, of course, written using cursors. Not being a skilled DBA, I could not rewrite the SP myself, so instead I broke it up into parts and has a script run the individual parts on all of the courses I wanted to delete.
Indeed, Tomcat is not to blame for speed problems. In fact current versions start up faster than Resin.
On Windows, however, it does have the distinction of being the only app server incapable of undeploying wars through the expedient of merely deleting their directory. It runs into the file locking issues on Windows, which I do suppose is partly the blame of Windows, but I'd also point out that no other app servers have this problem.
It also has classloader leaks that go back to the beginning of Tomcat, have never been fixed, and instead get blamed on bugs in the JVM (again it's a 50/50 thing, but Tomcat appears to be the only one incapable of working around it) .
It is fast, but so much junk for all these reasons. For just plain servlets, Jetty is king now.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.