Blackboard Wins Patent Suit Against Desire2Learn 186
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)."
As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Informative)
Blackboard sucks (Score:5, Informative)
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Blackboard sucks (Score:3, Informative)
Good luck. They can just sue you for violating their patent.
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:1, Informative)
At one point, BB AND WebCT were both claiming to be the world's #1 LMS.... until of course BB bought WebCT.
BlackBoard is so horrible in every aspect of it's programming, interface, and SUPPORT, the only people who are for it are administrators who get the ski trips and vacations and don't have to use it.
Angel is a thousand times better. As is Moodle. But the absolute best is FirstClass.
Your results may vary.
Re:Yes... That's What America Needs... (Score:1, Informative)
Then it's not an educational firm... it's educational only as a secondary, possibly accidental effect ...
Oh how sweetly naive. It's and educational firm, not an educator. Welcome to capitalism.
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.
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:3, Informative)
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 consequences of having a system load of higher than 5 on a single processor box.
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.
Re:On tomcat (Score:3, Informative)
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, have never been fixed, and instead get blamed on bugs in the JVM (again it's a 50/50 thing, but Tomcat appears to be the only one incapable of working around it) .
It is fast, but so much junk for all these reasons. For just plain servlets, Jetty is king now.