In a big blow to Blackboard Inc, the U S Patent and Trade Office today ordered a re-examination of Blackboard's e-learning patent. While reexamination does not mean invalidation of the patent, this is a welcome step. Not quite the beginning of the end, but possibly the end of the beginning.
The request for ex parte reexamination was filed by the Software Freedom Law Center on behalf of the Sakai, ATutor, and Moodle open source projects.
I have received many emails on Second Life's recent open source announcement. Stephen O'Grady's analysis is on mark and I highly recommend it.
On the education front we can expect continued experimentation in Second Life, including by faculty at my institution. Open sourcing the viewer alone neither helps nor hinders that effort.
"But all that said, I’m instinctively mistrustful of closed environments; they’ve been tried before on the web, and most if not all have failed when faced with open competition. That does not appear to exist at the present time, so Second Life has yet to face a real threat of this nature, but projects can evolve. Like David,  I’m quite reluctant to invest significant time, money or both on either a personal or commercial level in a world that is inherently closed in nature - and could become more so depending on the financial fortunes of the organization backing it. I can’t forgo it entirely, because several of our customers are beginning to conduct briefings in the virtual world, but I’m definitely a skeptic (and can’t see myself spending money on SL clothes when I won’t do so in the real world ."
We will be taking a serious look at Open Croquet and my hope is that open environments for building virtual worlds will now begin to pick up steam.