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Blackboard Announces Patent Pledge in Support of Open Source Software

This is the big news today, of course. "The Blackboard Patent Pledge is a promise by the company to never assert its issued or pending course management system software patents against open source software or home-grown course management systems." That's good, though it's pretty clearly a response to the Free Software Foundation's success in getting the Blackboard patent reviewed. better to cut a deal before you don't have anything to protect, hm? And even then, it's not much of a promise. As the Sakai Foundation notes, in its response, "the Sakai Foundation and EDUCAUSE find it difficult to give the wholehearted endorsement we had hoped might be possible. Some of Sakai's commercial partners and valued members of the open source community will not be protected under this pledge." In particular, Blackboard wanted to reserve the right to take action against colleges and universities, something it needs to do, apparently, because of its current case against the Canadian company Desire2Learn. Bottom line? It's a cynical ploy intended to divide its opponents. The appeal should be carried through. The patent should be invalidated. Blackboard's nonsensical case against Desire2Learn should be crushed. Press Release, Blackboard, February 1, 2007. [Link] [Tags: , , , , , , , , ] [Previous][Next]

Comments

Re: Blackboard Announces Patent Pledge in Support of Open Source Software

Richard Fontana, February 5, 2007

The re-examination request recently granted by the USPTO was
filed by the Software Freedom Law Center, not the Free Software
Foundation. We are a law firm; we filed the request on behalf of three
of our clients (Sakai, Moodle, and ATutor). The FSF is also a client of
SFLC, but it had no involvement in this matter.

We find that it is not uncommon for people to confuse SFLC and FSF
(probably in part because Eben Moglen, SFLC president, also currently
serves as general counsel of FSF).

Best regards,
Richard Fontana
Software Freedom Law Center [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Blackboard Announces Patent Pledge in Support of Open Source Software

Anymouse, May 23, 2008

The re-examination request recently granted by the USPTO was
filed by the Software Freedom Law Center, not the Free Software
Foundation. We are a law firm; we filed the request on behalf of three
of our clients (Sakai, Moodle, and ATutor). The FSF is also a client of
SFLC, but it had no involvement in this matter.

We find that it is not uncommon for people to confuse SFLC and FSF
(probably in part because Eben Moglen, SFLC president, also currently
serves as general counsel of FSF).
http://www.oyunuk.com

http://www.oyunlarkeyfi.com [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

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