Novell acquired by Attachmate Corporation | Hacker News Reader

Novell acquired by Attachmate Corporation

novell.com

108 pointsmapleoin50 comments

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"

Something about patents that Windows/Linux use?

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?

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.

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.

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.

"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.

I would imagine Microsoft would find Mono a very useful Novell asset to get control of.

Mono goes to Attachmate; see http://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/6804946666131456

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20101122130625952 has a good overview of the deal. Miguel de Icaza puts it simply at http://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/6804946666131456 : "MSFT bought the patents..."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

:-)

"the leader in intelligent workload management"

What does that mean?

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

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

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

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

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 ...

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

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

"PayPal. The world's most-loved way to pay and get paid."

Spotted as I fought the Catch-22 UX unsuccessfully to update my home address. There may be a universal law of physics for any business speech not subject to fraud claims. I'm sure everything in Japan is ichi-ban, etc.

Apart from not meaning much, it means they find ways to edge themselves into your your businesses, if you pay them some money, build up your reliance on their products, and are then forced to keep using the products or start your process from scratch. They're middlemen.

And that they make the more money than their competitors in doing so.

It means that "Groupware" is no longer a high-value buzzword.

Workload management refers to PlateSpin, Novell's server virtualization product.

Workload management always meant "Job Scheduling" to me - so I'm with you on this. Never knew Novell was in the job scheduling business (nor attachmate)

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).

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

Well, it does seem Microsoft was involved in buying some of the IP: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/whats-microsofts-role-in...

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).

Miguel has tweeter that Mono is going to Attachmate.

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

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

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.

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)

Novell owns Unix copyrights. Anyone remember SCO vs Novell?

Regards

Yep, Microsoft (probably) just bought Unix.

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

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

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

There was a time Microsoft made a very solid OS. It was called Xenix.

Though I agree about the solid part, I think MS bought rather than made Xenix.

Good point.

In any case, they sold it and it was called Microsoft Xenix.

Yep -- I worked for a (crappy and hopefully defunct) company that used it.

Microsoft bought a license to Version 7 Unix from AT&T. They mixed in some BSD stuff. Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) was originally one of the licensees of Xenix and ended up inheriting it from Microsoft around 1987.

SCO bought Unixware and some licenses for SysV from Novell. They ended up selling all that to a Linux and DOS vendor named Caldera. SCO ended up changing their name to Tarantella.

Caldera changed their name to The SCO Group and under the leadership of Darl McBride, they became one of the most annoying patent trolls ever.

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

No. People are not Intellectual Property.

Give it time.

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....

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

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.

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