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Blackboard's "Pledge" Not to Sue Open Source Software
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Feb 02, 2007 11:22 AM
from the nice-monster-good-monster-stay-there-monster dept.
from the nice-monster-good-monster-stay-there-monster dept.
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.
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First link is borked (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
If they are promising not to sue, isn't that a good thing?
Re:First link is borked (Score:5, Informative)
http://news.com.com/2100-7344_3-6155469.html [com.com]
The gist of the situation is that Blackboard is making a pledge, but (i) apparently the constraints of the pledge are incompatible with the GPL (so it does GPL'd projects little good) and (ii) they're reserving the right to revoke the "license" from anyone that sues Blackboard for patent infringement.
Of course, the real question here is whether they have a legitimate patent in the first place; if they don't, then the issues above go away.
[Note: I'm not a legal expert, I'm not privvy to the relevant docs, and I've not been consulted by any parties involved. As a result, I'm not saying that the allegations are correct; I'm just telling the author of the parent post what has been alleged.]
Parent
It's hogwash (Score:3, Interesting)
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 sou
The real problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the problem is that the patent system heavily favors the people that get the patent, wh
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Here's zdnet's coverage (Score:3, Informative)
"not evil" for now, until aquired/sold (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There's a third option, which is to create a non-revokable Class License applying to software licensed under open source licenses. That way, should the company be bought, anyone using the technology covered by the license under an open source environment will remain protected.
Personally though I'd rather just see the patent revoked. Supposedly there's another attempt brewing to get SCOTUS to look at software patents.
Blackboard's Quality (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Every feature of a commercial VLE can be coded rather easily?. So putting together competing free products was easy? Why not post that suggestion on the forums of Moodle or Sakai and see if they agree?
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't matter what Blackboard does and does not have in their product, only that the stuff that others can now 'do it right' in Open Source without litigation worries.
Or at l
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm the author of an open-source course management package called Spotter [lightandmatter.com], and I have to agree -- both the ideas behind and the implementation of one of these things are pretty trivial. My own software is more narrowly focused on science classes, and doesn't have some of the broader functionality in it that Blackboard has, but it still does enough that it seems to do every single thing
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1) file dump, like you said. PDFs, or, more often,
2) the forums get used every now and then. Mostly just for online classes, really.
3) grade reporting. Some departments/colleges use it, others don't.
NONE of these things requires Blackboard, and all could be replicated by a single competent sysadmin/coder in maybe a week's time, including ironing out (most) problems and making it easy and secure for the professors and students to use.
Good Old Blackboard (Score:5, Informative)
http://web.archive.org/web/20050404014123/se2600.
That's how it normally starts (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
A big suprise (Score:5, Informative)
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 [educause.edu] will keep the pressure up. BTW, there is a joint statement from educause and sakai (PDF) [educause.edu] on educause's website. (Here is the statement on sakai's page. [sakaiproject.org])
--JSBe Wary, Very Wary (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Blackboard just sucks (Score:2, Interesting)
The Alternative in Albuquerque (Score:2)
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 [typepad.com].
Blackboard is a buggy piece of shit (Score:2)
Reciprocation? (Score:3, Funny)
What do you say, guys? Should we pledge not to sue them in return?
No wait, that'd be really condescending.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bingo. This story looks like a company trying to put a positive spin on the fact that they're in the process of losing their patents due to a plethora of prior art. Their PR people won't, of course, mention this to educators, preferring to sow FUD so that they won't lose their de-facto monopoly over courseware at universities.
As our university is hurting for money and poorly endowed (ahem), I for one, am going to recommend Moodle [moodle.org] when it comes to renewing our Blackboard license. Based on my experienc