My university switched to something called Canvas (right after I graduated, of course) and it's incredibly slick, on top of it being fully OSS. Sakai is out there too — the quality isn't much better than Blackboard but at least it's free!
My school transitioned to Canvas from Sakai, it was like night and day in usability. I used Blackboard in highschool so even Sakai offered a major increase in usability.
Sakai and Canvas seem easy enough to setup that I can't imagine Blackboard can continue making money for much longer.
There's another system called LON-CAPA (written in Perl) that seems ancient compared the other competing systems. It was very easy to use and "just worked" but it felt like it was straight out of the Web 1.0 era.
I think most of the universities in California have been switching to Canvas. I also use Moodle, which is also FLOSS; personally I strongly prefer the UX to Canvas, but it may be less enterprise-y.
Sakai and Canvas seem easy enough to setup that I can't imagine Blackboard can continue making money for much longer.
There's another system called LON-CAPA (written in Perl) that seems ancient compared the other competing systems. It was very easy to use and "just worked" but it felt like it was straight out of the Web 1.0 era.