In this Q&A, Blackboard Learn President Ray Henderson and Moodlerooms Chairman and CEO Lou Pugliese explain why Blackboard is getting into the open source business, what's different about delivering services to those customers versus Blackboard's traditional customers, and what might be next on the open source agenda for the No. 1 learning management system company in the world.
Blackboard is buying out two major players in the open source services space: Moodlerooms and NetSpot. Blackboard has also brought onboard Sakai Project founding architect Charles Severance. With these additions, the company is also launching its own open source division: Blackboard Education Open Source Services.
Moodle HQ has posted three updates for three different branches of the Moodle learning management system, tackling a total of 15 recently discovered security vulnerabilities. The new versions also provide minor improvements and bug fixes.
Oracle is releasing a technology preview of Java SE 7 on Mac OS X and said it plans to release Java SE 7 on Mac OS X for developers in the second quarter of 2012 and a consumer version later that year.
Oracle has released JavaFX 2.0, a major rewrite of the company's Java platform for creating and deploying rich Internet applications (RIAs) that behave consistently across a wide variety of connected devices.
The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA), an organization of technology companies created to promote support for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization platform, reported it's experiencing rapid growth in participation from cloud computing companies and emerging markets around the world.
Echo360 is embedding its lecture capture EchoSystem portal for multimedia course materials within open source learning management system Moodle 1.9 and 2.0.
Red Hat has announced support for Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 6 on its OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
The next version of Instructure's cloud-based and on-premises learning management system (LMS) will include a new messaging feature that replaces the standard LMS inbox. The company is also readying a mobile edition specifically for students.
Oracle has announced the availability of the Java Platform Standard Edition 7 (Java SE 7). This is the first release of the core Java platform under Oracle's stewardship and the first new version of Java to make it out of the open source community in five years.