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Attachmate Corporation bought Novell thanks to a nice financing from Microsoft that, as a reward, he will keep some of Novell's patents. Very bad news ... |
Although the final approval of the acquisition is still pending, the operation has been carried out at about US $ 6.10 per share, totaling about US $ 2.2 billion. Novell has been acquired by Attachmate Corporation, which is part of the investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo. As part of the transaction, Elliott Management Corporation, one of Novell's largest shareholders, will become one of the major shareholders of Attachmate Corporation. For now, the company would have a very complete portfolio including Attachmate, NetIQ, Novell and SUSE.
The bad news is that Attachmate Corporation will split into two business units and plans to sell to CPTN Holding, a technology consortium of Microsoft, some of his patents, for which he will get about 400 million. Apparently, Attachmate has the idea of running Novell's business completely separate from SUSE. The purchase agreement includes a clause in which certain intellectual rights are sold to a consortium of companies organized by Microsoft, CPTN Holdings LLC.
In addition, Novell owned the UNIX trademark - the lawsuit with SCO ended that ruling in favor of Novell - but now that Microsoft could get hold of Novel's intellectual property, would UNIX also become Microsoft's trademark? The question remains open. However, it is worth clarifying that UNIX is not Linux and that this last aspect related to trademarks does not affect free software in general.
The truth is that Microsoft's purchase of Novell is not surprising, even indirectly (as in this case) through another company. The good harmony between Novell and Microsoft has a long history.
In any case, it will be necessary to see if this affects in any way openSUSE, the Linux distribution sponsored by Novell and which is the equivalent of Fedora for Red Hat.
Sources: linux today & Very Linux & Computer World
Hello everyone,
I just have a question, citing "enclosing free software", in your opinion, what can we do in defense of our philosophy.
Develop software with GNU licenses (the GPL, for example). And when someone buys a company that produces that kind of software. Start a new parallel project using all the previous code (which is legal if the software had a GPL license). This is the case of OpenOffice. LibreOffice is based on OO but from now on it will be a separate project.
Yes ... it seems that Microsoft and Oracle are beginning to move their chips to surround free software. What a pity! On the other hand, it was to be expected.
It is in these cases that we should revalue Richard Stallman and the GNU project. Not only because they emphasize the free software philosophy / ethics, which is the ultimate impediment that can prevent a company that makes money from free software from selling out to a monopoly like Microsoft (I'm thinking of Fedora or Debian, for example ), but also for the HUGE work they do daily to develop new patents that can protect users in these cases (GPL, etc.).
A hug! Paul.
mmm the thing looks orange with red tones. As you say in principle we should not have panic, but if it leaves us in a somewhat tense situation. It all depends on how the tiles move now.
I wonder how all of this will affect all Unix clones. Linux or freebsd ...