Supporting Open Source Software for Education
(cc) photo credit: zolierdos
I’m a little late on this one, but late last week the U.S. Court of Appeals denied Blackboard’s rehearing petition. Their only recourse now would be to appeal to the United States Supreme Court and hope that the court miraculously decides to hear their case. As a result, Blackboard will have to return roughly $3.3 million to Desire2Learn, wiping out 100% of the company’s earnings for 2008.
The University of North Carolina, a current Blackboard customer that is evaluating Sakai, just published a very interesting report of their findings so far. Among other things, it’s a good model for schools that want to do a thorough evaluation of a platform and have the resources (i.e., staff and time) to do it right. Here’s the excerpt of it that UNC chose to publish in their blog post announcing its release:
A while back, I wrote a post giving advice to small schools about selecting a new LMS. That post turned out to be reasonably popular. Today somebody sent me a link to a study done by the North Carolina Community College System comparing Blackboard to Moodle and, in particular, talking about the experience of some small colleges that had migrated from the former to the latter. The results are pretty consistent with the advice I gave.
photo credit: Kongharald
There’s a blog post update from Desire2Learn on the latest back and forth between them and Blackboard over the patents. (Remember, there’s more than one patent now.) Here’s the latest, as near as I can follow it:
Blackboard and TechRadium have apparently come to some sort of cross-licensing agreement on their emergency notification patents. This isn’t surprising. What we don’t know is whether anyone is paying anyone else as part of the cross-licensing agreement. Since Blackboard lost a ruling in their assertion of their patent against TechRadium, the more likely scenario would be that Blackboard is paying TechRadium as part of the deal. That’s just speculation, though. If anyone has any information on this, let me know.
No related posts.
Update: Patently-O blogger Dennis Crouch has posted a legal analysis of the ruling in which he concludes, “Defendant Desire2Learn wins a complete victory (after a few million in attorney fees).”
This is good news. Former ANGELista and current Blackboard Learn President Ray Henderson has started a blog, where he says he will respond to conversations in the blogosphere and generally try to make Blackboard more transparent. He has also turned blog comments on, which he acknowledges is a small deal in the wider world but a non-trivial deal for a corporate blog. (This is true.) Maybe he’ll respond to my post on three tests for the”new” Blackboard.
On the one hand, Thomson Reuters’ lawsuit against Zotero has been dismissed. Details are scant at this point. We don’t yet know the grounds for dismissal or whether Thomson Reuters will pursue other legal action. On the other hand, the U.S. International Trade Commission has agreed to investigate whether Desire2Learn is violating trade laws with patent infringement on some of the claims in Blackboard’s original ‘138 patent.