Slashdot Mirror
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.
More obstacles between people, and learning.
This one particular line almost made me vomit from my eyeballs: 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... Semantics notwithstanding, is it really even slightly plausible that a company focused on education would want to crush anyone else attempting to teach people?
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
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.
I've seen "multiple role" examples in various database books going way back. It's not rocket science. This patent is just taking a basic concept and saying that it a narrower context than the general example, it's patentable. It's like saying you can't have a headteacher object inheriting all the features of the basic teacher object in a teaching application, because we have patented the idea.
What other general concepts shall we patent in narrower contexts? How about patenting the basic concept of parent child relationships in Cinema Seat allocation software. It could get quite ridiculous.
We can be digested by all ridiculous patent stories on slashdot and yet we can still laugh at them becuase most of the time we are not directly affected by it. However, as ridiculous and terrible as most software and business patents are, they will be NOTHING compared to the next big trend in patents--genetics/DNA engineering. When some soulless companies in the future robbed people of a cure for a genetic diease because somehow they claim to 'invent' it, I bet most of us won't be laughing.
Patent reforms need to start NOW, or else it'd be too late and by then we (the general populace) would be too powerless to stop it.
Here's a place where patents really suck: a good idea gets sat on and cannot be used by people would could make into something good.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
... and those of us who are actually in the business of teaching and/or learning can get on with it.
My university uses D2L. I, as a TA, hate the motherfucking thing, end of story.
I have a professor who adamantly refuses to use it and posts course information as plain vanilla html pages (with pdf alternate links, if the LaTeK -> html doesn't look quite right). Nobody complains.
As a side-effect you can use curl to download all the notes at once. Try that with D2L.
I believe Windows has been copyrighted for quite some time.
A few years back, we had Blackboard on our campus. It was horrible and I refused to use it [Techie aside: Take a look at some of their JavaScript, it is bloated and beyond ugly]. However, someone persuaded the students that Blackboard was a wonderful thing. So much so, that their organizations petitioned the administration to make Blackboard mandatory for all classes. I don't know if the student leaders were bribed, but it would not surprise me -- it is sad to say how easily some people can be bought for the price of a couple of pizzas.
The students proposed a 'Blackboard is mandatory' motion that went through all the relevant committees. Fortunately, the Faculty Senate were rational enough to amend the motion to advocate not just Blackboard, but also 'equivalent technologies'. This left the way open for people to even use simple web pages.
Then the next thing you know is that Blackboard suddenly wanted a HUGE amount of money for the new version -- much more money than we could ever afford. The techs basically told them to go to hell, kept on using the older version while they could and began to experiment with Moodle. As one of of the more technically sophisticated people on our campus, I was one of the beta-testers for our Moodle implementation. It is always a fun job trying to break software! Although early versions of the implementation had quite a few rough edges, pretty soon, Moodle was up and running in a slick manner. Thus, for a short time, we actually had both versions. Also during this period, negotiations with Blackboard continued, largely without much progress. Eventually their greed was too much. Blackboard was just scrapped. It was not just the cost of the software, but also the hardware requirements that were ridiculous, which killed the system for us. We have now moved entirely to Moodle, which is doing very well, even if a few people were initially unhappy about the change. Hopefully, more schools will be inspired by the predatory nature of the Blackboard people to get that monkey off their collective backs.
In a final irony, just before the decision was made to pull the plug on Blackboard was made, one of my students demonstrated to me a method by which he could crack Blackboard and change the grades of assignments with relative ease. The main point here though is that behaving like bastards can ultimately have a business cost. I say to hell with Blackboard, support Moodle instead -- after all, it is open source!
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.