Microsoft has extended its agreement with SUSE to work on continued interoperability between Windows and Linux. The initial arrangement began almost five years ago, and the new deal will continue until the start of 2016. Microsoft will invest $100 million in new SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates for customers receiving Linux support from SUSE.
The acquisition of Novell by Attachmate is now complete, as the company's stock will no longer be publicly traded, Datamation reported on Wednesday. Novell is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Attachmate and part of the deal involves selling 882 patents to CTPN Holdings for $450 million, which was approved by the Department of Justice.
The Department of Justice has stepped in to regulate patent sales arising from the buy out of Novell. Novell agreed to be bought out by Attachmate, a group of private-equity firms for $2.2 billion in November. However, CPTN Holdings, a separate holding company owned by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and EMC, had sought to buy some of Novell’s patents in a move that would have threatened the ability of the open source Linux operating system to continue to develop server, desktop and mobile operating systems. The revised arrangements mean that the critical patents CPTN had sought to purchase will now remain under the GNU General Public License.
Google on Monday said it had made a strategic bid on Nortel's patent sale to protect Android. A "stalking horse" bid chosen by Nortel has put a minimum price of $900 million and is meant to discourage patent trolls, as well as anti-Android rivals like Microsoft and Oracle, from making relatively casual bids that let them attack the mobile OS further. Patent law was broken, and either acquiring the patents or forcing the price up was the best way of discouraging lawsuits meant solely to keep a competitor down.
The acquirer of 882 Novell patents as part of Attachmate's buyout of Novell includes Apple, EMC, Microsoft and Oracle, Germany's antitrust regulator Bundeskartellamt revealed in a notice for the deal. While created by Microsoft, the organization includes some of its competitors and suggests the buy wasn't intended solely or primarily for Microsoft's attempt to discourage Linux use through patent lawsuits. None of the companies have mentioned their plans or, until now, acknowledged their involvement in public.
Attachmate today bought Novell in a deal that has triggered worries of renewed lawsuits and legal pressure from Microsoft. The share-based purchase, equivalent to about $2.2 billion, had only Attachmate acquiring the SuSE Linux owner directly, but Microsoft in an SEC 8K filing saw 882 patents transfer to CPTN Holdings, a patent holding alliance Microsoft runs. The Windows developer was "pleased" with the deal, but Deputy General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez wouldn't say which patents had been acquired or explain motives.
