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Blackboard Wins Patent Suit Against Desire2Learn
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Feb 25, 2008 07:58 PM
from the that'll-learn-'em dept.
from the that'll-learn-'em dept.
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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Blackboard Patenting Educational Groupware 223 comments
chizz writes "Online learning provider Blackboard announced the other day that it has patented the Learning Management System (LMS). The very same day it went after Desire2Learn for Patent infringement in a truly Salt Lake City kinda way. A great many educators are a bit shook up by this, and are stockpiling prior art all over the place. "
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Developers: Blackboard's "Pledge" Not to Sue Open Source Software 84 comments
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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As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Funny)
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: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.
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:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Polymorphism (Score:4, Interesting)
Blackboard sucks (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Blackboard sucks (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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!
Re:I had no idea... (Score:5, Funny)