Patent Pledge in Support of Open Source Software fails to wow
If you are not an academic or somehow involved in higher education, the row about Blackboard’s patent on ‘Internet-based education support systems and methods’ may have passed you by - here is an understated reaction to the news shortly after it broke, here (surprisingly) is a more combative piece, here is a typical reaction and here is a plain-English account of what the patents, granted and claimed, mean and a warning that finding patent-scuppering prior art may not be easy.
This is the old news behind this week’s announcement from Blackboard of a “patent pledge in support of Open Source Software”. There are a couple of dozen follow-up postings on the web; some, like this one, are unimpressed.