Blackboard more evil than I thought

What do you do when your technology isn’t enough to set you apart? How about making questionable patent claims and suing your chief competitors? That seems to be Blackboard’s new strategy.

In a nutshell, Blackboard has apparently received a broad patent that seems to cover almost all learning management system concepts in current use. As a big Moodle fan you might think that I would be concerned by this. I’m not particularly worried. There’s a great effort underway to document all sorts of prior art to demonstrate that Blackboard hasn’t really invented anything new and isn’t worthy of patent protection. Let’s just say that I’m not going to hold off installing Moodle on a new server in my new job.