Standing on the shoulders of giants

Patricia McGee directed me to this post on the Blackboard patent issue by Frank Tansey. I had not seen it before and I think it is an interesting and thought provoking column. He, like some others have done, brings up the role of IMS. But he looks specifically at Blackboard's early participation in that group, and how they may have benefited from the brainstorming and sharing of ideas that occurred around the development of the .5 IMS specification. Go read the column.

One of the things it made me think of was the odd and frequently perverse economics that exist between higher education and vendors. One place where I am very familiar with this is in libraries, and especially in university libraries journal subscriptions. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has done some really yeoman work in documenting the strange economics and market dysfunction of universities and journals (eg at SPARC). We pay faculty in part to do research which they publish in journals for free. The journals then charge us enormous sums to subscribe ($20,000 plus per year for some in the natural and physical sciences) and increasingly we cant keep up and have to limit our subs and the access our faculty and students have to the knowledge that their peers produced.

There is probably a vendor side to this story as well. For example in certain areas of software it must be hard to develop a business model and make a buck in a very small and picky higher education market. But in a lot of the areas that I am familiar with we in higher education do really contribute a lot to vendor success. It maybe isn't that the vendors in this case are standing on the shoulders of giants -- it's more that they're standing on the shoulders of many many small contributions. It is impossible to lurk on the Blackboard list without seeing the myriad of ways that people help each other every day in solving problems and providing code and sharing materials. Its true of the Blackboard list but its also true of nearly every single academic technology product I know. I was at Wisconsin in the early period of the move to D2L and we shared a lot with Ohio State and others as they made a similar move. They shared what they learned, in turn. Thats' what we do in academia, and it contributes in very important ways to the success of the vendors. Without these millions of very small contributions they would not succeed at the rate they do -- there would be fewer IPO's and fewer fancy parties at the user conferences.

I wonder what effect all this patent activity is likely to have on this sort of sharing?

Comments

[Michael Penney]

One of the things that immediately comes to mind about roles and permissions is that these were initially developed for 'enterprise' scale use in Unix, such that a user could have varying roles in different parts of the file system, providing read only access in some places, write access in others, etc.