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Comment by desigooner | Hacker News Reader

Blackboard is one of the crappiest products i've used at school. Thank goodness I didn't have to put up with it for more than a couple of semesters before my school changed out to a different product to manage grades/courses etc. Administrative stuff like grades, assignments, etc. with Blackboard was a mind numbing exercise. One would need the patience of a monk to deal with it. The UX still looked like it was 1991 and nobody liked to use it, students and instructors alike!

I don't know how many startups and companies have been stopped in their path to improve service and experience by these litigious patent enforcing jackholes.

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As developer it's even worst, it's possible to develop module for the Blackboard platform and I had once to develop a module for that. Be aware you will see the worst documentation ever, even if you have access to all of it. 2 websites for the exact same thing, in which you have a zombie forum, a wiki in which there are a lot of empty pages, a lot of document which repeat almost the same exact example, etc. The platform is in Java ... and they don't provide the JavaDoc. Good thing I was paid, otherwise there is no way on earth I would have torture myself to do that thing.

Note: I wasn't working for Blackboard, but an other company which had got a contract to do a module for the Blackboard platform.

This deal has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with how difficult it is to sell into higher education.

My startup sells to higher ed, other governmental bodies and to businesses. Government is the hardest and takes longest and higher-ed is actually comparable to selling to businesses, once you figure out the process, in my experience.

And the fact that Blackboard has significant patents around what they do...

The '138 patent got stomped. Do they have others?

The irony is that (in my experience) ~90% of instructors don't use Blackboard for anything more than an easy way for the HTML-illiterate to distribute syllabi, course notes, and assignments. Unless forced by the administration hardly anyone even uses the gradebook, let alone the more advanced features.

At least one startup's doing just fine vs. Blackboard. Instructure Canvas just closed series B, is CEO'd by former Mozy founder and is LMS of choice for a growing number of schools (and soon to be @ Auburn if twitter's to be believed).

They avoid litigation (apparently) by open-sourcing their stack and charging for hosting/integration. Rails-based goodness.

[not affiliated - but was just identifying LMS options for a client]

They avoid litigation (apparently) by open-sourcing their stack and charging for hosting/integration.

That's a strategy to give buyers confidence in a new vendor, not an anti-litigation strategy. Open Source doesn't protect you against IP infringement claims.

There are some notable open source EMS' (educational management system) like moodle.org.

we explored moodle for tmedweb. The problem is most of these systems provide all the possible functions, whereas, in our experience, people wanted a very select subset. Parring down a CMS proved more painful than writing code from scratch.

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