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!