Novell agrees to be acquired by Attachmate.

[Ryan Lee Stanyan]

On Tuesday, November 23, 2010 03:56:54 pm Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On 11/23/2010 10:27 AM, Jon 'maddog' Hall wrote:
> >> so what goes to Microsoft's consortium?"
> >> 
> >>> concurrent sale of certain intellectual property assets to CPTN
> >>> Holdings LLC.
> > 
> > Which, from what I read, equates to 800+ patents.
> > 
> > As to the SCO suit, it takes two to sue.  The "new Novell" could say
> > that SCO was right all along, and it does own the intellectual property
> > rights to Unix.  Or the "new Novell" could say "go screw SCO" and SCO
> > (not having the backing of Daddy Warbucks any more, would fold with
> > Attachmate "attaching" those IP rights for whatever that is worth.
> > 
> > In any case, this does not look like a "win" for Linux, FOSS in general,
> > or even for the computing industry in general.  Just a large consortium
> > building their patent pool for trolling.
> 
> I would agree.
> Since this acquisition will probably not take place for a while because
> of regulatory issues, the SCO litigation is still an issue. Since Novell
> won twice in court, I suspect they will see it through this appeal
> process. Not sure what they will do if the appeals court sends it back
> for yet another trial.

I am not a lawyer, but if Novell put any of its Unix code into Linux they 
would not be able to bring suit against any users because it would be a breach 
of estoppel.  Novell or its successor would probably be found guilty of 
"pulling the rug" out from under users, and probably guilty of a subset of 
that by being negligent in enforcing its copyright(laches).  Both of these are 
not looked upon kindly by the courts.  Also, I believe there wasn't much that 
AT&T/USL copyrighted in the USL vs. BSDi case.