Just happened to see this article dated November 30, 2006 on the Sakai website. The Sakai Foundation Board of Directors has asked the U.S. Patent Office to “to reexamine and ultimately cancel all 44 claims of Blackboard’s patent on e-learning systems.” Educause, a collection of higher education institutions, issued an open letter to Blackboard on October , 2006. (Scroll down to the bottom of the page to read it). “Inside Higher Education” also has an article about this topic. Michael Feldstein, who is now the Product Manager for Oracle’s Academic Enterprise Initiative (AEI), is tracking the developments on his blog as well as Seb Schmoller from the UK.
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Um… what? None of this has anything to do with Blackboard becoming open source.
Well, I suppose it is all how you look at this. Jones Knowledge was pay as you go for awhile and then they gave their software away. Seems to me that if Blackboard is not able to keep their patents to themselves and if current Blackboard users migrate to open source LMS, there will be less reason for Blackboard to continue with their current business model. Time will tell.