Jim Farmer has an interesting guest post over at Seb’s blog about SpikeSource supporting Moodle on Windows/IIS. Both the creation of supported softwares stack for higher education and the mixture of proprietary and open source software in at least some of those stacks strike me as natural steps. I expect that we’ll see more of this kind of thing.
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SpikeSource Supporting Moodle on the Microsoft Stack
Published by April 22nd, 2008 in Higher Education and Open Source, Open Content, Open Access. 0 CommentsGreat Open Source Conference in Upstate New York
Published by April 22nd, 2008 in Higher Education and Open Source, Open Content, Open Access. 2 CommentsUpdate: The dates of the conference are actually June 19-20. Sorry about that.
(Patrick will never let me live this down.)
My friend Patrick Masson has put together a two-day conference at Delhi, NY on May 23-24 that looks terrific. The first day, which is about open source in higher education in general, has tracks on quality, total cost of ownership, and external support. The second day is a Moodle Moot. I’ll be one of the speakers.
Be there or be rectangular, as they say.
What the Sakai Announcement Means
Published by April 9th, 2008 in Higher Education, Tools, Toys, and Technology (Oh my!) and Open Source, Open Content, Open Access. 1 CommentBarry Dahl read the Sakai Foundation’s recent announcement about the Blackboard patent pretty closely and is concerned that it sounds like they think the fight is over. I completely understand why he interpreted it that way, but I read it a little differently. If you look closely at the specifics of the legal situation, the Foundation’s position begins to make a lot more sense.
Interview with an East Texas IP Lawyer on Blackboard v Desire2Learn
Published by April 4th, 2008 in Higher Education and Tools, Toys, and Technology (Oh my!). 0 CommentsA few of the usual suspects have pointed to this one already, but in case you haven’t seen it yet, Barry Dahl has a fantastic podcast interview up (about 30 minutes) with Michael C. Smith, an intellectual property lawyer in the district where the case was filed and author of EDTexweblog. Both interviewer and interviewee did a terrific job of really illuminating some of the legal nuances.
There is one point that bears revisiting, though. Michael, in answering Barry’s questions about the USPTO re-examination, appeared to assume that the re-exam was ex parte. This is a perfectly reasonable assumption, since ex parte is far more common a challenge type than inter partes. Nevertheless, the D2L/SFLC challenge is actually inter partes (or, to be more specific a weird hybrid of ex parte and inter partes that mostly follows inter partes rules). Some of Michael’s answers would probably be unaffected by this difference, e.g., the likelihood that the USPTO ruling will affect the prior court ruling. But some, like the probability of a successful USPTO challenge, how this challenge fits into a larger litigation strategy, and how the judge might react to the challenge going forward, could. I’d be really interested to hear whether any of Michael’s answers change based on this information.
Blackboard Fails Statistics 101
Published by March 29th, 2008 in Higher Education and Tools, Toys, and Technology (Oh my!). 1 CommentBlackboard has posted their response to the USPTO ruling. They make some claims about how this will impact the trial, which I’m not in a position to evaluate just yet. They mention that all of the claims in the re-examination request “were unsuccessfully raised by Desire2Learn during recent litigation,” which is irrelevant since these are different forums operating under different rules with different burdens of proof. But what really gave me pause was their statistic. They claimed that “more than 90% of patents that undergo reexamination of this kind ultimately are upheld.” That didn’t seem consistent with the statistics that I remembered. Where did that number come from?
Funny story, that…
