Blackboard's Groundhog Day pledge to open source

Blackboard Inc. has issued an open source patent pledge that may not be worth the virtual paper it's printed on.

Here is what the company's general counsel, Matthew Small, told Inside Higher Ed:

“The pledge covers anything anyone is realistically worried about in the e-learning community. Any school can look at this pledge and sleep easy at night.”

But this may be a Groundhog Day pledge, in that we could be reliving this day over-and-over again. That's because colleges, in addition to using educational groupware, also contain programmers who work on educational groupware.

Blackboard's pledge will not satisfy these people:

• It comes in the wake of a hotly-disputed patent application covering all educational groupware.
• Anyone in the open source movement who adds their work to a proprietary package loses coverage.
• Blackboard's FAQ indicates that putting open source code onto a CD with a proprietary product loses legal protection.
• Blackboard has a deal with Microsoft, dating back to 2001, under which it claimed it would "own" the educational market.

Groklaw is comparing this to the Novell-Microsoft deal. That is not a good thing. I wouldn't go that far.

But if a company wants to assure people it's not going after them with lawyers, don't put loopholes in the deal, especially if you're trying to run it by colleges, where people are often guilty of education.

This controversy may have just begun.