Turns out Blackboard lawyers have stated they have no intention of going after opensource since they are not commercial (oS that is). But then they have commercial partners.

Interestingly on one of the claims Sakai falls wide, since it doesn’t have static sets of roles. Rather they are fluid through the whole system. Moodle does have more static sets but not for long. And once we all get Shibbed, that part of Blackboards patent is really old hat.

But whatever, there is lots of prior art about way back to 1960, and even Blackboards original system came out of Higher Ed….. unless they believe they have a patent on general Internet Groupware ?