Here’s a late-breaking item from the Sakai Foundation:
In the wake of recent efforts to limit the free and open sharing of innovation for online learning, the Sakai Foundation has retained the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), an organization directed by Eben Moglen and dedicated to providing advice and legal services to protect and advance free and open source software, to evaluate the recent Blackboard patent, its impact on the educational community, and to advise on legal matters regarding the patent….Sakai has engaged the SFLC to assess and respond to the patent, but the Foundation believes that the core issue is much broader than the current technology in question. Sakai is working with the SFLC and others of like mind to develop a long term common defense effort, and encourages everyone to contribute to the SFLC to support its efforts now and in the future to aggressively challenge bad patents in the area of educational and research software.
For those of you who don’t know, Eben Moglen is a pretty big deal. In addition to chairing the Software Freedom Law Center, he has affiliations with the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Nice. It would be good to see large aggregators of licenses (the MiCTAs of the world) and other groups that represent large stakeholder bodies (the SREBs, large state systems, etc) to follow suit as well and get legal advice they can share with their members (and hopefully further a field) to move this from wild speculation and teeth gnashing to more (legally) informed opinion.