And MS gets "certain [Novell] IP assets"

Posted Nov 22, 2010 18:04 UTC (Mon) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Another interesting item from the Patent Purchase Agreement section of the 8-K: "Also on November 21, 2010, Novell entered into a Patent Purchase Agreement (the “Patent Purchase Agreement”) with CPTN Holdings LLC, a Delaware limited liability company and consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft Corporation (“CPTN”). The Patent Purchase Agreement provides that, upon the terms and subject to the conditions set forth in the Patent Purchase Agreement, Novell will sell to CPTN all of Novell’s right, title and interest in 882 patents (the “Assigned Patents”) for $450 million in cash (the “Patent Sale”)."

Looks like this is just patents, not dusty file cabinets full of historic UNIX copyrights. Optimistically, maybe it's just MSFT trying to protect their Active Directory business from Novell's directory-related patents.