
Novell acquired by Attachmate Corporation - mapleoin
http://www.novell.com/news/press/novell-agrees-to-be-acquired-by-attachmate-corporation
======
absconditus
I find this to be the most interesting part:

"Novell also announced it has entered into a definitive agreement for the
concurrent sale of certain intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings LLC,
a consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft Corporation, for
$450 million in cash"

~~~
andrewf
I wonder if it includes the UNIX copyrights.

Novell's waiver got a whole load of SCO's claims rejected. Hands up: who wants
to see that particular can of worms reopened?

~~~
wickedchicken
Well, those were claims that Linux copied from original UNIX code. Since that
was rejected and new code added to Linux is most definitely _not_ from a
30-year-old codebase, I would imagine Linux is safe.

~~~
rbanffy
Not only that, but by distributing the code, Novell effectively, under the
terms of the GPLv2, granted usage and redistribution rights to all receivers
of that code (me, you, Red Hat...), regardless of whatever patents they could
violate.

I love the way GPL renders toothless some threats.

And the claims Linux code was a copy of Unix were completely refuted, IIRC.

~~~
mbreese
I'm pretty sure that a lot of people would disagree with your view that the
GPL grants an automatic patent license. It doesn't. At least GPL v2 doesn't.
It was always assumed that there was an implicit grant, but as far as I know,
this has never been tested in court. And I'm pretty sure that Oracle doesn't
think that this is the case, since this is how they make money on Java.

Also, I'm not sure if the copyright question was ever full ruled upon, since
SCO never had standing to sue over something that they didn't own. I didn't
follow all of the SCO rulings, but since they didn't own any UNIX copyrights,
that argument could have just been moot.

~~~
rbanffy
"6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program),
_the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to
copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions_.
You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the
rights granted herein."

It's quite an unambiguous grant. Not only patents, but of whatever other
instrument that could be used to remove the right to redistribute verbatim or
modified versions in accordance to the rest of the license.

It was never tested on court. This can be a reason.

------
mapleoin
_Novell has been going nowhere for the past few years. It looks like now it's
finally arrived._ \--One of my colleagues

------
trunnell
Novell Netware was once the king of enterprise networks. It's a great case
study of how a technology leader went from invincible to invisible in under a
decade.

------
jakarta
To me, what is really interesting about this deal is how it all came about.
Elliott Associates forced Novell to put themselves up for sale after Elliott
offered to buy the entire company. They're a really interesting hedge fund
because they get involved in these extremely esoteric areas of the market
where they have little competition -- for example, a few years back they were
buying up defaulted sovereign debt and suing countries to force them into
paying up.

With this deal, not only is Novell getting sold to Attachmate, but Elliott is
also an equity investor in Attachmate, so they can benefit from the upside.

Now that markets are becoming more and more volatile, these kinds of
transactions where you force an event are going to be in demand in order to
keep returns up.

~~~
kierank
_They're a really interesting hedge fund because they get involved in these
extremely esoteric areas of the market where they have little competition --
for example, a few years back they were buying up defaulted sovereign debt and
suing countries to force them into paying up._

They're a vulture fund, which are considered to be highly unethical when they
profiteer from third world debt, and are banned in the UK.

------
blantonl
What a long strange ride it has been for both companies. I remember back early
in my career supporting Attachmate 3270 mainframe cards - clearing print
queues in Netware 3 print consoles, and marveling at the release of an object
registry in Netware 4's NDS.

------
runjake
Miguel is usually around here. What does this mean for Mono?

~~~
migueldeicaza
We will continue working on Mono :-)

Let me take this opportunity to remind everyone that MonoDevelop 2.4.1 just
came out, and that you can get a 20% discount on MonoTouch this week by using
the "BLACK-FRIDAY" discount code.

:-)

------
sudonim
"the leader in intelligent workload management"

What does that mean?

~~~
jacquesm
As a rule, American companies will present themselves as the 'leader in X',
whatever the actual state of affairs in 'X'.

~~~
jcromartie
Or, if they are an honest company, they will define X to be so narrow as to
only include one company.

~~~
pillsy
Wongle Inc., the leading provider of fine Wongle Inc. products!

~~~
mkramlich
I wonder who are the non-leading providers of Wongle product? Oh that's right,
some pirate/clone knockoffs based in Asia. ;)

~~~
huxley
Wongle Inc. doesn't make Wongles anymore, they exclusively specialize in
Wongle IP brokering. Wongle Inc. products now consist entirely of Wongle
related patent licenses ...

~~~
mkramlich
ok who are we kidding... are we talking about HP here or IBM? :)

------
tomasr
Wonder if Attachmate is keeping Mono, or if it makes part of the assets being
sold off to CPTN Holdings LLC (whatever it is they do).

~~~
jcarreiro
CPTN Holdings is "a consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft
Corporation". So, Microsoft.

~~~
tomasr
Well, it does seem Microsoft was involved in buying some of the IP:
[http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/whats-microsofts-role-
in...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/whats-microsofts-role-in-the-
novell-attachmate-deal/8041)

But notice they don't say what that IP was, so it's not clear if it was Mono-
related or not yet. Not sure what MS would do with any Mono-related IP or if
they'd really care about it (except for killing it, of course, and I wouldn't
think that is their intention).

------
aberkowitz
I hope Novell has transferred all IP pertinent to Linux to the OIN [0] before
the sale.

[0] <http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/>

~~~
rbanffy
Not needed. The GPLv2 has an implicit grant to use patents, so, anything
Novell did with that IP that touches any GPL'ed code it distributed puts that
code and its derivations in a more or less safe position.

It's not as watertight as GPLv3 or Apache, but it may be enough.

------
nl
So..

How come when Oracle bought Sun the DoJ and EU looked into the anti-trust
issues around Oracle owning MySQL (which _obviously_ was never going to be an
anti-trust issue while there are other SQL databases out there) and yet there
is no noise about it when Microsoft gets some kind of IP rights to _Unix_?!?

Obviously it isn't clear exactly what MS got, but this could conceivably
impact every single commercial and open source operating system in existance
except for IBM's midrange & mainframe OS's.

(Ok, realistically I'm sure Apple & IBM & Oracle have iron clad licences for
OSX and AIX and Solaris, but surely the point is that Microsoft - a convicted
monopolist - shouldn't be allowed further market power in the operating sytem
market)

------
jjoe
Novell owns Unix copyrights. Anyone remember SCO vs Novell?

Regards

~~~
mvalle
Yep, Microsoft (probably) just bought Unix.

Somehow, there's something poetic about that...

~~~
SkyMarshal
I suppose it's too much to hope that Windows 8 will be a *nix...

~~~
deno
If one trusts the slides that leaked about Win 8 then no. Plus Windows already
has a decent kernel.

------
motters
Does this mean that Miguel de Icaza becomes a Microsoft employee (via CPTN
Holdings) ?

~~~
mapleoin
No. People are not Intellectual Property.

~~~
athom
Give it time.

------
dctoedt
Bloomberg is reporting that Novell is "the maker of _Linux_ operating-system
software ...." (sic; emphasis added). See
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-22/novell-will-be-
acqu...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-22/novell-will-be-acquired-by-
attachmate-for-2-2-billion-or-6-10-a-share.html).

(It's repeated further down in the story.)

~~~
bitwize
Novell owns SuSE. That's probably the biggest thing they have going right now,
so yes, they are the maker of _a_ Linux operating system.

