...it's the competition. I administer a moderately-sized Bb 8 installation (some 1000s of concurrent users, we migrated from 6.3 last semester without too much trouble, and without paying Bb their outrageous consultancy fees) and in all honesty, we would LOVE to ditch Blackboard. Bb 8 is a heckuva lot better than 6.3 but it's still pretty much inadequate. We have a moodle setup up and running for a different part of our online courses, and it gets used pretty thoroughly. HOWEVER, and I hate to say it, moodle is not a replacement for Bb. Not even close. Personally I'm all about the FOSS stuff, but if we tried to mandate migrating from Bb to moodle, our faculty would absolutely explode (this is an highly-rated engineering college and they're quite tech-literate) because most of them just don't have the time or the inclination to revamp their tried-and-true online course material, let alone chase a whole new set of bugs/workarounds incumbent in moving to a new CMS. Inertia is a powerful force :\

I sincerely hope this decision gets us a little closer to having a real alternative to Bb, because paying them to "develop" such a inadequate CMS just feels a lot like highway robbery

PS Bb on commodity 1u servers running Centos 5.3 is WAY faster than on Solaris 10 boxes. We still use Solaris for the Oracle backend but the performance under linux just beat the pants off slowlaris (hate to say it cause I'm a solaris guy)

This sort of thing is hardly new. My wife (medical school grad, ER physician) has a whole TEXTBOOK written by GlaxoSmithKline. She wrote a scathing review of that particular segment because of it, but you better believe that if it makes business sense to do this sort of thing it's going to be done.

running TweakUAC, which allows one to continue operating UAC in quiet mode...

"In such a mode, you keep all the positive effects of UAC, such as Internet Explorer operating in the protected mode, applications starting without the administrative privileges by default, etc. The only thing that gets changed is that you will no longer see the infamous "Windows needs your permission to continue" messages whenever you attempt to make a change to your Vista configuration, or when you run a program that needs administrative rights."

Great! However, Vista didn't like being the server for my Synergy setup with Gutsy on the 2nd monitor. Once I made Gutsy the synergy server it was much more well behaved. Really, it's hard not to have both a Gutsy and a Vista box. They're both pretty fresh.