Update: Sakai, Blackboard Comment on Patent Pledge

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Update: Sakai, Blackboard Comment on Patent Pledge

2/2/2007

By David Nagel

Blackboard, all along, has stated and maintained that it would not focus on schools or open-source developers in terms of enforcing its patent. However, members of the open-source community and the education community both expressed fears that the patent and the lawsuit against Desire2Learn would have a chilling effect on development of CMSes and generally impact these communities negatively.

The patent pledge
So Blackboard answered some of those fears Feb. 1 by releasing a formal, legally binding pledge that it would not enforce its patent against open-source developers, naming all of the developers who work in the CMS space, or against those who support those products, either commercially or otherwise. That includes those who host, customize, maintain or otherwise support those open-source products. The pledge also covers those who develop "home-grown" CMS systems for schools, colleges and universities.

Sakai and EDUCAUSE, two vocal opponents of Blackboard's patent, released a joint statement generally supporting the Blackboard patent pledge, the complete text of which can be found below. But there were some reservations in that statement, particularly about the portion of Blackboard's pledge excepting "bundled" software from protection.

"I think Blackboard put their best effort into capturing what they thought they wanted to give to open source and at the same time not give everything away that they didn't want to give," Sakai's Severence told us. "I think this is a step in a direction that should assure most people at universities that they can use open-source software and not worry about the patent. I think that's quite clear. People can feel more comfortable with this document than they did before."

He said that Sakai did provide input on the wording of the pledge, which had been in development at least since December. "We iterated on the pledge words with Blackboard since before Christmas," Severence said. "They would propose text, and we would review the text and send back comments. We tried to represent what we thought was open source's position in our conversations with Blackboard."

He said that Sakai had suggested early on that Blackboard issue a statement of non-assertion using wording similar to that found in the famous IBM non-assertion pledge. (The text of that statement can be found here.) But, he said, "with Blackboard, there was a feeling that [the IBM non-assertion statement] just didn't have enough detail in it. And so they needed more assurance ... that the non-assert was going to accomplish what they wanted to do--and that is protect universities and others using and participating in open source--[but that it wouldn't make them] wind up in court the next day fighting with the judge on the words they had just written. You can tell from the Sakai and EDUCAUSE statement that [the Blackboard pledge] would have been received better if it had been a simple, unequivocal statement, like the IBM statement."