Sad end for Novell: Sold to Attachmate

Nov 22, 2010, 23:03 (4 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier)

[ Thanks to Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier for this link. ]

"The waiting is over, and the winning suitor has finally been revealed: Novell is being sold to Attachmate for about $2.2 billion with other bits being sold to CPTN Holdings for $450 million. It's a sad end for a once-great company, and could have some unpleasant side-effects for other open source companies and communities.

"Disclaimer: I was employed by Novell from February 2008 through January 2010 as community manager for openSUSE.

"Though many (myself included) had Novell pegged for sale to VMware, the company is being sold mostly to Attachmate with "certain intellectual property assets" being sold to a consortium backed by Microsoft. It's unclear what those assets are, but Novell holds more than 460 patents (according to a quick skim of the USPTO patent database online) and the copyrights to early UNIX, among other IP."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Novell Sold to Attachmate for $2.2 Billion(Nov 23, 2010)
• Baracus: Novell's New Open Source Network Boot Project(Nov 19, 2010)
• openSUSE Conference: A Time for Introspection?(Oct 28, 2010)
• VMware Buying Novell? Why Add More Blah?(Oct 22, 2010)