If Blackboard can’t help you fix your problems, you’re out of luck, because nobody understands their code or has the right to look at it. If your Moodle vendor can’t help you, you can go to another vendor, or find another adopting school that knows how to fix the problem. You can also fix it yourself. You don’t have to, but unlike with Blackboard, you can. Likewise, if Blackboard were to go out of business (ask WebCT or ANGEL customers if this sort of thing ever happens), you wouldn’t be able to find somebody else to support and continue to develop your platform. Not true with open source support vendors.


Blackboard’s Response to Open Source: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

The lack of support argument gets trotted out so often to attack open source, and it really shits me. You generally have one support option if you’re using proprietary software, the vendor. With open source you have at least three types of support; fixing it yourself (by which I mean literally yourself or hiring someone to do it), paying a support company to do it, or relying on the community fix it through normal processes.