Now that the Blackboard/D2L patent fight is over, I am taking down the edupatent feed harvester, which never worked particularly well anyway. Mostly what showed up in the feed were my own posts, which you can still access by going to the edupatents tag.
Author: Michael Feldstein
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Blackboard v. Desire2Learn Is Over
All lawsuits have been dropped by both sides. The companies will cross-license each others’ patent portfolios under undisclosed terms, which gives both companies an opportunity to save face. After three and a half years, higher education can move on. Left unresolved is the larger question of the role of patents in higher education, but that is at least as much a question for the universities as it is for the vendors.
For now, though, I’m just happy it’s over.
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Blackboard Contributing Code to Open Source Project
According to Scott Rosenbaum, a business intelligence consultant, Blackboard has given him permission to contribute code back back to the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project (or, more accurately, they are contributing the code as separate open source projects that can be “used by the community”). The project that generated this contribution is not entirely clear from Scott’s blog post, but I infer that it’s reporting tools that are used in the Blackboard product itself. So, it looks like (a) Blackboard may be incorporating open source code into their product, and (b) they are contributing some of the modifications they made to that code back under an open source license. (Any clarification on any of these points by Scott or by Blackboard is welcome.)
Nice!
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Sakai 3: What It Is and When To Move To It
I have been getting a lot of questions from the Sakai-curious lately about the whole Sakai 2 vs. Sakai 3 question. When will Sakai 3 be “ready”? When is a good time to migrate? If I’m under pressure to migrate in the short term, what should I do? Should I go to Sakai 2 and migrate later? Or is that like trying to leap the Grand Canyon in two hops? These are tough questions, in large part because they depend a lot on the specifics of your institution. I’m going to do my best to provide some guidelines here and, in the process, provide some context about what Sakai 3 is as well as how the Sakai community is working together on it.
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Sakai Blogging
I have been thinking a bit about how my new roles on the Sakai Foundation Board and Product Council intersect with my role as a blogger. To be clear, I intend to maintain my independence on e-Literate. I will continue to praise other platforms when I see something praiseworthy, and to speak out when I see something in the Sakai community that I think could be better.
That said, one way in which I might be able to usefully combine the two worlds is to use e-Literate as a platform for increased transparency into the Sakai community. There’s a lot going on that isn’t always obvious to many community members, never mind the general public. I’m going to do my best to bring some of these goings on to broader attention. And obviously, I wouldn’t be volunteering for the roles I’ve taken on if I didn’t believe in Sakai—both the software and the community.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I will be posting more about Sakai going forward, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop writing about other platforms.
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On "Open" Proprietary Software
There’s been a lot of buzz from various proprietary LMS and SIS vendors lately about how “open” their respective platforms are. I think it’s important that we have a sophisticated notion of openness that is more nuanced than all or nothing. At the same time, I also think it’s important that the word be grounded in reality and not reduced to meaningless marketing-speak. I don’t claim to have any definitive answers as to what should be labeled “open” under what circumstances, but I would like to explore the concept a bit further by reflecting on the ways and degrees to which Oracle’s PeopleSoft Campus Solutions (CS), the SIS platform that I happen to work on, may be “open”. Note that, to my knowledge, Oracle hasn’t run any big marketing campaigns touting CS as “open” and I’m not making any grand claims about it either. It happens to be an example that I know relatively well and as good a place to start as any.
So here’s a non-exhaustive list of ways in which proprietary software could be called “open”:
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I've Been Elected to the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors
I am gratified—and slightly surprised—to announce that the members of the Sakai community have elected me to serve on the Sakai Foundation’s Board of Directors. I deeply appreciate their faith in me. I also am grateful to my employer for not only enabling me to make the time commitment but also for actively supporting and encouraging my decision to run in the first place.
Congratulations to fellow new board members Ian Boston, Maggie Lynch, and Chuck Severance. The bios and platforms of all the nominees, including but not limited to those who got elected, are here.