Also not clear is Microsoft's interest in these patents. In 2004, Novell hit Microsoft with an antitrust lawsuit, alleging that Microsoft tried to squelch competition in the office-productivity-applications market during the time that Novell owned WordPerfect, which is now owned by Corel.

The patents that would be acquired by CPTN in Attachmate's purchase of Novell probably wouldn't have that much bearing on the antitrust case, though, noted Charles King, Pund-IT's president and principal analyst of the Pund-IT analysis firm.

Another possible area of interest for Microsoft would be the IP around Unix held by Novell. In March, the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah confirmed that Novell owned the copyrights around Unix, ending a seven-year battle between SCO and Novell over ownership rights.

combuster: http://www.itworld.com/open-so...28493/the-end-penguin-not-nigh

Fino razmisljanje... :) I hope...

Stator: Ne smem da se slozim sa tekstom, u zadnjih 5 godina Red Hat je duplirao svoju vrednost tako da ona opaska sa "slash their already thin revenues" nikako ne stoji. Plus niko nije lud da tuzi IBM pa ni MS licno. Ako ovi odrade to sto su namerili SLES ce propasti, a pogodi gde ce otici njihovi kupci? U Red Hat naravno. Sto ce ga ciniti samo jacim. Jer je sama migracija SLES -> RHEL mnogo bezbolnija nego SLES --> Windows. Dakle stvari nisu toliko crne.

Novell's copyrights for the Unix operating system will remain under Attachmate's control as part of the companies' pending merger, a Novell spokesman said Wednesday.

The confirmation, which came in a terse message posted to Novell's website, seems to rule out questions of whether Unix assets are part of some 882 patents being sold to a Microsoft-led consortium, CPTN Holdings, as part of the deal.

"Novell will continue to own Novell's UNIX copyrights following completion of the merger as a subsidiary of Attachmate," the message stated.

Attachmate completed their acquisition of Novell last week and turned the assets into the Novell and SUSE business units. This morning the first signs of changes were announced when over one-hundred employees would be losing their jobs as part of the streamlining process. Later on in the day I was then to first break the news -- a rumor at the time -- via my Twitter feed that all of Mono's developers would be losing their positions.

I'm now settled in for the evening in Germany and the news of the Novell Mono developers being let go has been confirmed. Mono is out at Attachmate. I'm told that it's around 30 developers that were employed by Novell working on the Mono platform, which is an implementation of Microsoft's .NET for Linux and other non-Windows operating systems.

Mono is a binary compatible implementation of C# and the Common Language Runtime (CLR) for Linux, Mac, and Unix that comes with tools that plug into Visual Studio. Mono was started in 2004 by well-known open sourcer Miguel de Icaza.

de Icaza also started the open-source implementation of Silverlight, Microsoft's alternative to Flash, under a project called Moonlight. Microsoft has benefited from Moonlight because it has helped support Microsoft's claims that Silverlight is a cross-platform technology and furthered interest in its own media runtime. Silverlight runs on just Windows, whereas Moonlight runs on Mac, Unix, and PC.