This line in the article:
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But Blackboard's software has an appeal for institutions with smaller budgets that can't fund developers to build their own open-source applications, Davidson said.
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Shows a total misunderstanding of open-source. Institutions do not need to 'fund developers' to take advantage of open-source. We use the open-source program Moodle (www.moodle.org), a quality alternative to Blackboard, save substantially over the cost of Blackboard and do not need to 'fund developers'. The software is available for free.