What We Do (and Don�t) Know about the Novell Patent Sale

"Ever since the proposed acquisition of Novell by Attachmate Corporation there has been much curiosity, but almost no information, relating to the other major piece of the deal: the acquisition of 882 patents by a consortium led by Microsoft for $450 million. There are three main areas of undisclosed information that are piquing peoples' interest, and in this bog entry I'll go through each of them.

"Who are those guys? The first and most obvious question relates to who the other members of CPTN Holdings, LLC (CPTN) the Microsoft syndicate may be. To my knowledge, there has not yet been a leak of this information. As I noted in my previous blog entry, the transaction documents that are made public pursuant to public reporting obligations may never reveal the names, unless one of the consortium members is required to disclose it in one of its own public reporting documents. Presumably that will happen, if it will happen at all, within three to four months, as part of a normal quarterly filing on Form 10-Q."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Yes, Novell Owns Unix(Nov 29, 2010)
• Understanding the Novell Deal (and when we'll learn more)(Nov 25, 2010)
• Who owns what in the Novell deal(Nov 25, 2010)
• Novell Sells Out to Attachmate, Leaves the Future of Suse Linux Unclear(Nov 24, 2010)
• Who really bought Novell? Microsoft.(Nov 23, 2010)
• Novell Attachmate attracts class action lawsuit investigations(Nov 23, 2010)
• The End of the Penguin is Not Nigh(Nov 23, 2010)
• Novell Agrees to be Acquired by AttachMate; Sells Some IP to a MS-Organized Consortium(Nov 23, 2010)