But since you brought it up, there are a number of differences worth highlighting. To begin with, I invite you to list recent patent infringement suits in which Oracle was the plaintiff. I think you’ll have a hard time finding examples. And you certainly won’t find any examples of Oracle asserting a patent against an educational software company. I have long argued on this blog (since well before I was an Oracle employee) that higher education is a special case because the economics are so weak that patent assertion is particularly harmful.

I could go into a longer list of details about how Oracle competing against RedHat, a publicly traded enterprise software company with a multi-billion-dollar market cap, in no way resembles Blackboard suing a small educational software company over a dubious patent, but again, I feel no compunction to defend my employer in my personal blog.

Do yourself a favor, though. The next time you decide to post a flame to somebody else’s blog, do your homework first. If you want to know the details about the Blackboard patent and my positions on it, then start reading.