[ Thanks to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for this link.
]
“Well, this is almost certainly not the Novell patent deal that
Microsoft and its CPTN Holding Partners-Apple, EMC and
Oracle-wanted.“The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced that in order to
proceed with the first phase of their acquisition of certain
patents and patent applications from Novell, CPTN Holdings has
altered their original agreements to address the department’s
antitrust concerns.“In particular, the department said that, as originally
proposed, the deal would jeopardize the ability of open source
software, such as Linux, to continue to innovate and compete in the
development and distribution of server, desktop, and mobile
operating systems, middleware, and virtualization products.”