Good news: the UNIX copyrights owned by Novell will not fall in the hands of Microsoft as part of the IP purchase by Redmond. “Novell will continue to own Novell’s UNIX copyrights following completion of the merger as a subsidiary of Attachmate,” states John Dragoon, Chief Marketing Officer at Novell. Yeppers.
That was pretty obvious really. Why would Attachmate buy SUSE if theyd risk being hit by MS shortly after?
Well, as seven years of the SCO saga thoroughly illustrates, the Unix copyrights have absolutely nothing to do with Linux.
There is no Unix code in Linux. Linux is simply a newly-written-from-scratch implementation of POSIX standards. POSIX is a set of specifications from which one is meant to be able to write Unix-compatible operating systems.
Also, it has been clear for some time now that what Microsoft purchased was 882 Novell patents. This also has absolutely nothing to do with Unix copyrights.
So, in a double sense, what risk was there (from the Unix copyrights) to Attachmate buying SuSe? None that I can see.
Edited 2010-11-25 01:08 UTC
I notice that Novell’s policy statement is still available on the Patent Commons website.
http://www.patentcommons.org/commons/pledgesearch.php?displaypledge…
What is interesting is that when one searches on the Patent Commons website for Novell patents pledged, where there used to be a lengthy list, one now finds no results:
http://www.patentcommons.org/commons/patentsearch.php?formType=resu…
This can’t be good.
Edited 2010-11-25 04:41 UTC
Andy Updegrove of ConsortiumInfo.org explains how Novell still exists:
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20101…
So.. Novell is dead. Long live Novell!?
I am interested to know what it was that Microsoft got from Novell? What could Novell have that Microsoft really wanted?
Hmmm…
Well – Novell has (or had) NDS (Network Directory Services), and a lot of spin-off from it. Microsoft has tried to copy NDS with Active Directory’s, but it was a bad imitation – probably because they where hold back by patents surrounding NDS.
Now it is possible they got all patents to use the full NDS version and use it in the next windows server version.
No – I don’t know if this is true, but I think is is at least a part of the answer…
This is good news. I starting to worry about this.