OSI asks German Federal Cartel Office to investigate CPTN transaction

“Earlier this month it was revealed that a consortium of
companies led by Microsoft have offered over $400M to strip out all
of Novell’s patent assets from the Attachmate transaction and place
them into a new entity called CPTN. The principals of CPTN were
secret from the open source community until Dec 16th, when they
were discovered and published.

“The fact that Microsoft was leading the takeover of Novell’s
patents was itself alarming to the open source community, but when
it was revealed that Microsoft had recruited Oracle, Apple, and EMC
to be co-owners of the patents, the OSI Board felt compelled to
request that competition authorities take a closer look at the
proposed transaction.”

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