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Comments: 186 +- Your Rights Online: Blackboard Wins Patent Suit Against Desire2Learn on Monday February 25 2008, @06:58PM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Monday February 25 2008, @06:58PM
from the that'll-learn-'em dept.
from the that'll-learn-'em dept.
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education
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)."
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As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Informative)
Almost all of my tutors use their web space to provide material and updates etc. Interestingly, it's the couple of lecturers/professors who are lacking in the, er, quality department who DO use Blackboard and rave on about it.
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Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Mod parent up (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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, ha
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is, that sort of purchasing decision almost always gets made much higher up, or even at the state level. That's also why you also see SunGard/Banner all over the place.
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The group where I worked was a network operations center for several universities, and because the Blackboard server admins were puzzled by slow performance - "almost certainly a network problem," they told us - we agreed to let them keep the server with us. That was convenient, because the next time it was slow, I was in a unique position to explain to them the co
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I teach on various university courses with ca. 50-150 students each. Our term began this week. I have become so frustrated with Blackboard, and it led to a disastrous situation last month where 15 students almost failed a course through no fault of their own, and so I have given up on it. My university's IT department have been made well aware of the reasons, ... and as you might expect, they plan to change nothing, and will keep on throwing good money after bad on Blackboard.
For various reasons setting up
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Funny)
Except for the professors who actually listen to the students. In my brief time trying to use Blackboard as an instructor, I pretty much concluded that I would spend more time trying to make it behave than it would take me to write the damn thing from scratch, so I used it as little as humanly possible.
The only thing it did that I couldn't do trivially with my own web space was do online quizzes, and frankly, I could have hacked something together that would have been less painful for both teacher and students in a day or less... coding while drunk, while smoking crack, while a herd of midget pygmy women had their way with me, while watching Red Dwarf reruns, while being beaten ruthlessly by a psycho ex-girlfriend with a cat of nine tails, and while hanging upside down with a rope tied to my testicles... simultaneously....
Yes, it is really that bad. In fact, that description pretty much summarizes how it felt to use Blackboard from a teacher's perspective. If your teachers like it, I truly wonder about them. :-D
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They didn't patent the crapness (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:They didn't patent the crapness (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is why the patent should be thrown out.
Patents were intended to give the patentholder exclusive control over the use of a method for a limited period of time. Methods can cover a lot, but in the end they should be specific. In the Olde Days, patent applicants were required to submit prototypes of their inventions.
If the end result of the patent is to fence off a concept and not an implementation, then the patent itself is, I think, invalid.
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Re:They didn't patent the crapness (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I believe patents (not just software patents) shouldn't exist full stop (due to both economic and ethical reasons I won't go into here), but software is exceptionally problematic due to its nature - IF you allow patents on software, it is _necessary_ that patents be on the "idea" at some level, because idea/method is not a dichotomy in software, it's a spectrum.
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Re:They didn't patent the crapness (Score:4, Insightful)
Software patents and those who thrive upon them must be exterminated from society, progress is infinitely more important than money.
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Not to mention horrible on resource usage. My school (University of Toronto) is in the process of switching to Blackboard, and they had to build an entire new server room to run it. CCNET all the way!!
Aikon-
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Yes... That's What America Needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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This only contributes to the dumbening of our children.
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Of course it is. It's a perfectly cromulent word.
Polymorphism (Score:4, Interesting)
Blackboard sucks (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Blackboard sucks (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They found a system WORSE than WebCT?!?
Oh yeah, they found it alright.
Now that Blackboard has acquired WebCT, it's getting worse, inconceivable as that might seem. The licensing was getting out of hand even pre-acquisition, and my Spidey-Sense tells me we're just about to take it on the chops from Blackboard. This patent, which stakes out the ground for role-based rights as a Blackboard invention, will kill all innovation as well as open source implementations such as Moodle and Sakai, etc. Everyone is going to be afraid for the future of t
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Good luck. They can just sue you for violating their patent.
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I have used WebCT and Moodle, the former as both a teacher and a student, and the latter as a teacher.
WebCT rocked, but was expensive. Moodle sucks, but is OSS. But Blackboard? I have never heard a kind word uttered about it.
Being patent trolls doesn't help my image of it, either.
Relational DB's (Score:2)
The "Is a..." relationship type in a relational database.
A Person is a Student. A person is a Teacher.
etc...
Once Again (Score:4, Insightful)
This is standard Database Stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
So Obviousness Really Doesn't Matter (Score:3, Funny)
Why patent laws needs to change ... NOW (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
It'll be as easy to change then as it is now. The difference will be that it's an area most people care about. One computer company pulling off a dumb lawsuit against another company is a niche problem. A pharmaceutical company exercising a patent against another pharmaceutical company that's developing new cures for cancer will get people in an uproar. Look at stem cells for what happens when the government ignores what people think is the best way to manage healthcare research.
Change will come, it'll
Seeing "NTI", the first thing that comes to mind.. (Score:2)
"N-T-I... Oh, Non-Terrestrial Intelligence. That's Better than CIA..." (from the Abyss)
I had no idea... (Score:2)
What a country!
Re:I had no idea... (Score:5, Funny)
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egad (Score:2)
This court is probably filled with dunces (Score:3, Interesting)
D2L's intro spewed buzzwords for maybe a minute, but it was quite grating. Worse, no pause or rewind or similar buttons.
BB's demo had pause button, but instantly reminded me of a webified version of ms access, which i would never want to touch.
If both apps are just turning to code what was done by hand, how can BB win? Both interfaces seem different, judging by their demos. Granted, getting hold of the functional versions of each will be the best way to compare them.
I suppose, were I to sit down with 100 teachers, and ask each for their advice on creating an automated grade point average, curve break points, and so on, it would not be research, but patent infringement. If that is the case, then the judge, the court, and the USPTO all need fids and anchor chains hammered up their rear ends.
Any programmer-turned-teacher should be free to develop and freely distribute OR SELL their OWN implementation of grading and scheduling systems.
As for some hare-brained idea that there is something novel about a student being a teaching aid in one subject and a student in another, that's just the height of idiocy.
Example, when I was in the USN (US Navy, many moons ago), we had this thing called "BMI" Basic Military Instruction. Sometimes, a senior seaman or 3rd class petty officer monitored as another subordinate lectured. Later in the week, or in the month, or the quarter, another sailor gave another lecture or course of material. Over time, we had our PQS (Personnel Qualification Charts) filled by date, time, pass/fail/understand/etc and other items.
Fast-forward to real-world college or high school settings. Math whiz kid mentors history kid in one year or semester or quarter or trimester. Science whiz mentors both, while Student D mentors the other 3. Later, in other classes, all are mentoring some or others.
It's just a souped-up database that schedules classes and helps create bell curves. Depending on the database, this need not even be achieved programmatically. Modules with lookup tables might do just as well, lending greatly to data atomicity, integrity and to other benefits of relational databases.
How in the hell is BB's positioning/"differentiation" novel?
Good. Maybe they will sue each other into oblivion (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
They do not always win... (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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Blackboard's licensing fees are usually per-faculty, rather than per student, or flat size-of-institution-based. So, a VP of IT, CTO, etc., has a hard time justifying the purchase to trustees when only 20% of the faculty uses it.
I don't know your institution's case, but most of the time, mandating use of Blackboard is a
.edu loses, .com wins (Score:3, Insightful)
Prior art was out there (including from the company I worked for), but neither Desire2Learn nor the educational community provided enough organizational will and competence to find it and kill this patent lawsuit. I personally spent hours of my time gathering prior art evidence as well as soliciting teachers and developers to help fight this. After tepid responses from both sides (including a form-letter sent one month later from Desire2Learn), I shrugged and walked away.
Hopefully this doesn't affect open source LMSes such as Moodle or Sakai, but if it does then the EDU community has only itself to blame for not stepping up to the plate.
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Learning Management System, it says it right in the summery.