What was supposed to have been announced on May 11th came through as late-breaking news yesterday, regarding the Blackboard-D2L patent lawsuit.
During a telephone hearing late today [May 6], Judge Clark granted an extension of the stay of the injunction he entered in March. The Court granted an extension through June 11. More information will follow once we receive the Order from the Court. (From the Desire2Learn Patent-Info’s Blog).
This is good news for the faculty and students of Minnesota State Colleges and Universities who will be able to continue using our current version of our enterprise-wide instructional management system (D2L) until our scheduled upgrade to version 8.3 in early June. The stay will allow D2L to support its American clients with the upgrade to 8.3, which most are expecting to have completed by early June. Had the stay had not been granted, D2L would not have been able to support its clients on any versions other than 8.3, but more importantly, they would have been precluded from assisting clients with the upgrade (which — do you see the Catch-22 here –only D2L can do), Why? Because upgrading to 8.3 meant they would “touch” versions 8.1 and 8.2, which are part of the upgrade path.
While the system was preparing for many scenarios, including “worst case,” this ruling takes an immense pressure off of everyone concerned while getting clients (including our massively huge enterprise application) to the new version. At least until any future rounds of legal actions are undertaken by Blackboard assessing whether 8.3 indeed stands up to officially being free of patent infringements. But let’s not go there…yet. Instead, I’ll try to focus on D2L’s assurances posted in their blog:
We will be working closely with our clients to help them upgrade to Learning Environment version 8.3, our official design-around version.
The Minnesota Maven (on Academic and Personal Technologies) 