Mueller: 882 Novell patents go to Microsoft, Apple, EMC, and Oracle

That will only happen when Redhat is acquired by Oracle. We all know that Redhat would put up one heck of a fight before that happened.

google should have bought it, or even Redhat should do it, sigh.

I've seen speculation that at least some of the 882 patents may be office technology (remember Novell's WordPerfect history and the MS anti-trust suit they lobbed based on that, that was settled out of court) and/or net directory (Novell Net Directory, MS Active Directory) related.

Significantly, all four of these companies have interests in at least one of the two, so this development shouldn't surprise anyone with such speculations, and at least three of the four (EMC being the possible exception, its interests would be on the possibly XML related document handling side, tho, see Documentum) are targeting Google ATM. Google of course would be interested based on its Google Docs product, which may be targeted. But of course, that's where the OIN subthread comes in.

Also supporting that speculation is the MS/Novell cross-licensing agreement -- perhaps the fact that MS ended up paying Novell as a result of said agreement wasn't just buying Novell off after all, if Novell had hundreds of patents in the above areas that MS might have been stepping on. And, significantly, the deal is worded in such a way that Attache-mate, the company buying the rest of the Novell including SuSE (and Novell if the Attache-mate portion falls thru), continues to have usage rights to the patents afterward, something they'd certainly be interested in if some of them covered office tech such as OOo, and/or directory services tech.

But, it's just speculation, even if reasonable speculation that happens to match up nicely with the known facts...

I read the original article on Groklaw after finding a link to it, and ended up rather confused, myself. Certainly, PJ knows way more about it than I do, she's the paralegal after all, but it /appears/ obvious that it can't be as she says, because Google and Oracle are both licensees, and Oracle's suing Google for among other things, unlicensed use of Oracle patents.

Rather, as Mueller has pointed out previously, OIN's pool-coverage is actually quite limited, to a list of Linux related technologies as listed and defined by OIN. (IIRC, Mueller actually pointed out that it's the members that control this list, and that it can and does change from time to time in a manner that's not particularly transparent! Actually, I just did some googling and refreshed my memory and barring my misunderstanding, that /is/ an accurate paraphrase of his statement.) Within that core-Linux context, OIN members and licensees agree not to assert patents against each other, but if it falls outside that context, as is the case with the present Oracle/Google case, it's fair game, even if both are OIN licensees and even if the implementation at issue is running on top of a core-Linux that is itself covered.

Given that PJ must certainly know all this too, these facts aren't private after all and she's the paralegal, not me, why didn't she explain it that way in the article, instead of making it appear as if it's a full royalty-free in-perpetuity license-grant? As I said, paint me confused!

Meanwhile, I've observed previously that Mueller and PJ don't particularly get along (as should be obvious to anyone that reads comments on related coverage here at LWN), but /had/ previously chalked that up to personal differences and honestly, as I suppose many of us, tended to favor PJ. But with this... I really don't know. I simply found that whole article... weird, incongruous with the facts as they are publicly available or at least as /I/ know them. What could she possibly be seeing differently than I am? Because there's certainly something, and given her track record, I'd love to understand where she's coming from here because it has previously seemed to be right on the money, elsewhere. But confused I certainly am right now, that's for sure!

Regardless, it's /entirely/ safe to say there's more to the situation than I know or can understand, and given the article I'm replying to whether the author himself claimed confusion before quoting PJ, I believe it's fair to say I'm not the only one.