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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)."
Mark my words. I have *never* come across anyone who liked it, in my entire undergraduate experience. Professors and students alike despise it, yet somehow our opinions don't seem to matter to the people making the purchasing decisions.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
You are very observant. As I reread this, I realize it looks like a ridiculous, cardboard-cutout of a troll, but I put forth that any sysadmin reading this will immediately recognize this as the voice of truth, and agree:
I've had the (mis)fortune of working with Blackboard as a sysadmin for about five years now.
It is without a doubt, a gigantic hacked-together hodge-podge under the covers. The installation guide is probably 300+ pages. Tasks that should be, by anyone's standards, put into a shell script are simply written out and numbered in the guide, which does nothing but increase the perception that not even the program's authors care about it.
Blackboard runs (or at least used to run--to be fair, later versions are apparently more cohesive) on a strange polyglot of Perl, Java, and Shell (and who knows what else). The vast array of underlying technologies has the feel of something that's been hurriedly duct-taped together, and you're almost amazed the thing runs at all.
Worse, upgrades are fantastically painful--accomplished by applying the endless patches in the proper order (obtainable at the 'behind the blackboard site' which is discouragingly useless) and any one of them can fail for any of a hundred different reasons.
Nobody I know in the education technology industry claims to like installing/administering it, and in fact, it's become one of those tasks that nobody likes to do--almost a running joke. Hoping to ingratiate myself with my employers, I volunteered to be the "Blackboard guy," a decision I've regretted to this day.