OSS and

To update my post on the Blackboard patent, here is some more detail on the requested reexamination of the patent claim and the Sakai Foundation's response.

As Paul Erickson notes (thanks, Paul!), the news initially started bubbling up when the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) announced that it has formally asked the Patent Office to reexamine and ultimately cancel all 44 claims of Blackboard's patent on e-learning systems.

The request has demonstrated the very real sense of unity and common purpose among the educational open source software community. It was filed on behalf of the Sakai Foundation (sakaiproject.org), the Moodle Community (moodle.org), and the ATutor Community (atutor.ca).

In their press release, the Sakai Foundation refers to the "the surrounding fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) being spread by Blackboard", and states: "We, the Sakai Foundation, consider the Blackboard patent to be a prime example of a bad patent in the area of educational software.  It is a threat to open source developers, providers and users of educational software."

OSS Watch, the UK's non-partisan advice service on open-source software and open standards, have just published a survey report last week about software use in UK higher education.

The survey, carried out in February-March 2006, reports on the take-up of open-source software (OSS) in UK Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) institutions. By default, it also gives a picture of the NON-takeup of open-source solutions. The survey is based on data collected from nearly 1 in 5 UK institutions (18%), making it a useful information baseline from which to extract trends and make future predictions.

There's a lot of good reading in the report, but the thing that interests me most is that it shows that there is currently no clear leader amongst Content Management Systems (CMS) in UK HE. Why is this?

Stuart and Paul will probably have opinions about this :-) What follows is my 2p worth. (NB: Stuart responded before I could upload the rest of my post -- however I think we agree on many points).

One argument for diversity in e-learning systems and services for higher education is that instutions are themselves diverse, and have specific needs – particularly in relation to pedagogy. But is this really true? Are the needs of HEIs actually that diverse? If we look at the range of software in use within HE, we see that within particular domains, a handful of commercial providers dominates the landscape: such as Oracle’s PeopleSoft within administrative services; or Microsoft’s Windows Explorer for staff/student web access. Indeed, the OSS survey report shows that Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer are deployed by all institutions on most desktops. And this software is not necessarily restricted to administrative functions: for example, web browsers and email applications are commonly used within teaching and research practice, too.