Novell agrees to be acquired by Attachmate.

[Jerry Feldman]

On 11/23/2010 10:55 PM, Ryan Lee Stanyan wrote:
> 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.
It depends who actually gets the Unix IP. I believe it remains with
Novell, but there is still the SCO vs. Novell case that is under appeal.
Then there is the SCO vs. IBM. Novell has also waived their IP rights in
the IBM case, but that is one of the things that SCO is challenging. I
seriously doubt that Attachmate would sue anyone in the Linux community
in the same way SCO did. I'm still focusing on the SCO litigation since
even in Bankruptcy with a trustee running the company they are still
strongly pursuing the litigation. I certainly don't see either Novell or
Attachmate yielding the Unix IP to SCO, so I expect the SCO vs. Novell
case to proceed at least through this appeal.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846


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