Daniel Eran DilgerIt was first revealed in mid December that the four companies had set up CPTN Holdings LLC to jointly acquire 882 Novell patents for $442 million.
The rest of Novell was to be sold to Attachmate for $2.2 billion, with that sale being "conditioned upon the closing of the proposed sale of certain intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings LLC." according to the original Novell press release about the acquisiton.
However, according to a new PC World report, the filing with German regulators to create the joint entity has been voluntarily withdrawn, with no information available to explain why.
Open source controversy
The pact had drawn intense criticism from open source advocates, with both the American Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) filing complaints about the plans with the German Federal Cartel Office, which had received the original CPTN proposal.
The report noted that the filing was too new to have actually been rejected by German authorities, as no investigation had yet occurred, indicating that the CPTN members had voluntarily backed out of the filing. Whether the legal entity will be set up in another location, or under different terms, or dissolved entirely, is still yet unknown.
Free software groups expressed serious concerns that Novell's patents very likely involved a variety of concepts related to free software technologies, given the company's ownership of SUSE Linux and Ximian and its relationship with other free software projects including OpenOffice and Mono.
Novell was also a founding member of and major contributor to the Open Invention Network, a group created by IBM, NEC, Philips, Red Hat and Sony to hold patents specially for use in defending free software from outside patent attacks.
Complaints from the OSI, FSFE
The OSI filed a letter complaining that, "the founders and leaders of CPTN have a long history of opposing and misrepresenting the value of open source software, which is at the heart of Web infrastructure and of many of the most widely used software products and services. The sole or leading competition for several products from the CPTN principals are open source."
FSFE president Karsten Gerloff added that "in many markets (such as operating systems, desktop productivity, web servers), Free Software programs are the key competitors to Microsoft's offerings. And Microsoft has used patent lawsuits to stifle competition from Free Software (e.g. TomTom), and has long used unsubstantiated patent claims for a continued campaign of fear, uncertainty and doubt against Free Software."
Gerloff noted that the CPTN members could, in addition to directly thwarting open source, also transfer the patents to "non-practicing entities," or companies that exist only to sue others over patents they hold, commonly referred to a patent trolls.
"In September 2009," Gerloff pointed out, "Microsoft sold 22 patents related to GNU/Linux during an auction where only non-practicing entities were invited."
Fears about Android
Google's Android OS is already being sued by Oracle, which recently acquired Sun and subsequently has accused Android of infringing Sun's Java-related patents to create Android's Dvalik, a Java-like virtual machine platform that works like Java and uses the Java language without technically being Java, therefore escaping (in Google's view) the licensing requirements of Java.
Oracle is seeking to force Google to legitimately license Java, something that would add cost to Android and may require a significant redesign or complete replacement of its core virtual machine architecture.
The involvement of Oracle in the CPTN pact had only heightened existing concerns. Both Microsoft and Apple are also direct competitors to Google's Android, and both companies have sued (and been sued by) Android licensees, although neither Microsoft nor Apple have taken any legal action against Google directly related to Android.
While Microsoft has threatened to take nonspecific patent-infringement actions against other companies that make use of Linux and OpenOffice, and financially supported SCO as it ensnared a variety of companies using Linux in a legal quagmire that dragged on for years, Apple has typically reserved its patent library for defensive purposes.
As the most sued tech company on the planet, Apple has repeatedly fought to nullify patents or settle patent claims using patent cross-licensing. Apple formed such deals with both Microsoft and Creative, and has shot down a variety of patents that other companies paid millions to settle, including a large number of Burst.com patents.
Apple is currently involved in a variety of patent disputes with Nokia, Motorola and HTC, and is also fending off renewed patent claims from former Microsoft founder Paul Allen's "non-practicing entity."
-m.jpg)
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
Sponsored Content
Wesley Hilliard
Malcolm Owen
Amber Neely
24 Comments
A plan created by Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and EMC to create a consortium to acquire hundreds of Novell patents has been withdrawn after complaints from open source advocates, leaving the fate of the nearly half billion dollars' worth of patents uncertain.
Planning to become patent whores was bad enough, but now they pull the rug out at the last minute and screw up the whole deal?
Geez. Buy them and donate them to the public domain. It's chicken feed to multinational players like these.
Planning to become patent whores was bad enough, but now they pull the rug out at the last minute and screw up the whole deal?
Geez. Buy them and donate them to the public domain. It's chicken feed to multinational players like these.
Thanks for weighing in, tekstud.
Free software groups expressed serious concerns that Novell's patents very likely involved a variety of concepts related to free software technologies, given the company's ownership of SUSE Linux and Ximian and its relationship with other free software projects including OpenOffice and Mono.
So, the Free Software groups want to freeload on proprietary work and patents now? Given the latest dust-up over VLC I thought the freetards were the ones making the big deal about freeloading.
They use copyright as their threat and sword, but that isn't that different from patent when it comes to comparing implementations in a courtroom. Way different means of protecting IP, but copyright and patents are both just about protecting IP.
Freeloading is freeloading, whether you call yourself a Free Software supporter, an Open Source supporter, or merely an open source/open standards supporter (capitalization counts heavily in this sentence). Whining about it, or the potential for it, after the fact does not make illegal freeloading legal. If Novell granted any patents in perpetuity to public domain or an open source organization, they will remain that way. If Novell didn't, the coders that accepted that code into the open source made some grave errors quite explicitly.
The standards organizations are VERY meticulous about that kind of thing. Being cavalier and sloppy in the name of "Free" anything is just plain a bad way to conduct business. Having seen how many (which probably means almost all) projects vet code, which doesn't come with any questions as to whether or not the commits may be encumbered, just equates to "Hear no IP, See no IP, Consider it all my IP".
Frankly I would love to let the a group like the FSF have it's day in court and see whether this form of ignorance can be legally considered a shield.
Thanks for sharing the news. I disagree with the suggestion above that it be put into public domain. When you remove commercial incentive from innovation, their is less of it.
Also, nearly every professional with a 401k, IRA,stocks, or a job has a vested interest in intellectual property. That's not what this country was built on. Also, from a standpoint of litigation. Innovation that can be protected leads to heavy investment which (if successful), leads to profits, leads to growth, jobs, shareholder dividends, etc.
Jake
Right. And losers like you perpetuate the myth that there is such a thing as "intellectual property." Take your stupid plug and sod off.
I would like to see Ubuntu, RedHat or Google buy all the Novell IP out right and open source it. It would be a a big hit for Ubuntu, a moderate cost for RedHat and trivial one for Google, but the benefit would be enormous - to all developers.
Likewise, I wish RedHat or Google had acquired and GPL'd all of Sun's IP. That would have been a game changer.
Oracle's attempts to underfund and close Sun's open source projects only seem to be making them less desirable and less valuable, and ultimately, make oracle less competitive.