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!
BIRT is used in the Blackboard Learn code. The Blackboard 9.0 platform uses the BIRT reporting tool to provide reporting capabilities for various modules of Blackboard Learn. We are excited to provide this code back to the BIRT community.
As a technology company Blackboard has used open source technologies from the earliest days of CourseInfo. We’ve been heavy users of Linux, Apache, Eclipse and other open source tools and frameworks in support of and as part of our software. We include the licenses for these frameworks as part of our overall license and provide links to appropriate sources when requested by customers. We review the license requirements of each open source technology components with our legal team to ensure we are comfortable with the obligations outlined within their licenses.
We also use a number of commercial technologies as part of our stack such as the Oracle database. For most of the technologies we use (open source, commercial, other) we have partnerships that ensure we have relationships with the people who develop and maintain the software. For example when we used Perl more heavily we had a support relationship with ActiveState.
The decision to use an open source technology vs. a commercial one has always been about specific capabilities of the technology and the best way to meet the needs of our customers over the long term. We’ve had mixed experiences with open source solutions, but then we’ve also had mixed experiences with commercial ones as well. They key thing has been to have the right partnership in place before adopting the technology. As part of this partnership we’ve had to develop code for open source projects ourselves sometimes; but most of the time we’ve focused on how to consume the technology in a sustainable way. Sustaining the technology has typically meant paying someone somewhere to give us support, advice and training required to integrate and use the embedded technology.