Tag archive: Novell

Google's buyout of Motorola Mobility has cleared two major hurdles. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) announced late Monday afternoon that Google's bid to buy Motorola for $12.5 billion does not violate antitrust laws, and will be allowed to proceed. Earlier in the day, the European Union also approved the deal. In addition to the Google's bid for Motorola, the DoJ also approved Apple's request to buy a cache of Novell… Read More

After years of litigation, Novell's antitrust case against Microsoft has ended in a hung jury. A single juror was left unconvinced that Microsoft leveraged its monopoly power in the desktop operating systems market back in the mid-1990s to advance its own Microsoft Office suite and crush WordPerfect and Quattro Pro. The result is that the case (which dates all the way back to the introduction of Windows 95) could find itself going to… Read More

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates took the stand today as the first witness in a case brought against Microsoft by Novell that dates all the way back to the dark days of Windows 95. In a nutshell, Novell claims Microsoft abused its monopoly power in the desktop operating system market to crush WordPerfect when Microsoft launched Windows 95—and, with it, a Windows 95-compatible version of Microsoft Office. Microsoft claims no such strategy:… Read More

Microsoft and Attachmate have announced a five-year extension to an agreement that has the Redmond software giant reselling SUSE Linux certificates to business customers—along with a promise not to sue those customers if Microsoft ever decided to take Linux to court. The deal is an extension of a controversial deal Microsoft made with Novell back in 2006—that deal was worth about $240 million; the value of the new deal is open… Read More

These days, the .doc suffix is synonymous with Microsoft Word—but did you know, back in the Dark Ages, it used to be synonymous with WordPerfect? Some people still do, and now an appeals court has reversed a lower court's summary judgement and cleared the way for Novell to pursue an antitrust claim against Microsoft to squeezing WordPerfect out of the productivity applications market back in the 1990s. The legal tangles in the… Read More

The Attachmate Group has finalized its acquisition of Novell, completing a $2.2 billion deal announced last November that puts Novell into private hands. Attachmate intends to operate Novell as two separate business units under the Novell and SUSE brand names, alongside Attachmate's own brand and NetIQ. “Novell has had many chapters in its 28-year history and today marks the start of a new, exciting chapter,” said… Read More

Novell raised eyebrows last week when the company announced it was going private via a $2.2 billion purchase arrangement with Attachmate. However, the aspect of the deal that sent a chill through the Unix and open source community was that a consortium led by Microsoft was buying some 882 patents from Novell in a $450 million deal. While neither Microsoft nor Novell are commenting on what patents and IP are involved in that sale, Novell has… Read More

Although Novell hasn't been a big name in consumer computing since the days when WordPerfect was duking it out with Microsoft Word, there's some big news to report today: the company has agreed to go private by being acquired by Attachmate Corporation in a deal valued at $2.2 billion. But that's not the only part of the deal: as part of the transaction, Novell has agreed to sell nearly 900 patents to a consortium of companies… Read More

Back in 2007, an outfit called IP Innovation LLC filed a patent infringement lawsuit, claiming that Linux vendors were infringing on patents it owns—including U.S. patent 5,072,412 covering “User interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects.” Now, a Texas jury has ruled in favor of Red Hat and Novell, finding the patents at the center of the suit was invalid because of extensive prior art. The case… Read More

It's one thing to vow that you won't go down without a fight…and it's another to tilt at windmills. A Utah jury has found that Novell owns the copyrights to Unix. The ruling perhaps puts the final nail in the coffin of SCO's claims that Linux infringes on copyright it acquired from Novell…although SCO still maintains Linux includes proprietary code that would need to be licensed from SCO. “This… Read More

Earlier this month, the hedge fund Elliot Associates offered $1.8 million to take over storied software maker Novell—Elliot already owns about 8.5 percent of Novell, but believes the stock has underperformed and that it can maximize the company's value to its investors if it takes over Novell and “restructures” the company…which is usually industry slang for tearing the company apart and selling the pieces to the… Read More

Hedge fund Elliott Associates has made an unsolicited $1.8 billion offer to take former software giant Novell private, in a move apparently motivated to maximize the company's value to investors a series of strategy changes and acquisitions have failed to put Novell back into the top tier of technology companies. According to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Elliott believes Novell's stock has significantly… Read More

Just when you think you're out…they pull you back in. That might be what Novell is thinking today after a federal appeals court overturned a 2007 trail court decision that granted the copyright of the Unix operating system to Novell, apparently putting an end to an ages-long legal dispute between the companies…and which has threatened to engulf Linux operating systems. The reversal apparently clears the way for the—now severely… Read More