"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."
