BlackBoard Says They Won’t Sue Open Source – Put It In Writing!

Inside HigherEd has recently posted an article about the BlackBoard patent issue and in it BlackBoard’s General Counsel Matthew Small opines…

"…Blackboard has no plans tochallenge open source projects on patent issues, and he said that suchchallenges “wouldn’t make good business sense” for the company…"

That’s great to hear, but it seems that BlackBoard is struggling to get people to believe them when they say this. There is a simple solution.

Put it in writing.

What I mean is that now that BlackBoard has the patent, they can license it to the Sakai Project or Martin Dougimas (aka "Mr. Moodle") or others. We know they have lawyers, so it should be a simple matter to draft up a license agreement that gives sufficient rights to Sakai and others so that they can stop worrying.

It would go a long way towards assuaging the communities fears.

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