Skip to main content

Attachmate completes Novell acquisition

Novell Logo
Image used with permission by copyright holder

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 Novell’s chief marketing officer John Dragoon, in the company blog. “As Novell joins forces with The Attachmate Group, the result will be a powerful portfolio of companies united by a common purpose and dedicated team. I’m confident existing Novell and SUSE customers will continue to enjoy the great relationships and products that they’ve come to expect from Novell.”

Recommended Videos

The acquisition had generated controversy in the open source community because, in addition to the actual copyrights on Unix, Novell owns a number of patents utilized in open source products. Attachmate had indicated it intended to hold onto the Unix copyrights under the deal, but the original acquisition plan would have had Novell would selling some 882 patents to CPTN Holdings for $450 million. The buyer for those patents was the specially-created CPTN HOldings, a coalition that includes companies like Apple, EMC, Oracle, and Microsoft, raising the specter that Microsoft would use ownership and licensing of the patents to attack open source vendors.

However, as a condition of the acquisition, the U.S. Justice Department last week adjusted the terms of the CPTN patent sale to prevent them from being used as a weapon against open source products. Under the adjusted deal, Microsoft will be selling Attachmate back all the Novell patents it would have acquired under the original deal; in return, Microsoft will receive a license to use those patents. The other three stakeholders in CPTN will be able to hold onto the patents they receive through the process, although EMC is specifically barred from acquiring 33 Novel patents related to virtualization.

Geoff Duncan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
High-Tech, High-End: Must-Have Luxury Tech Gadgets to Gift This Holiday
Level Up Their Tech, But Make It Luxe
luxury tech gadgets best gifts

Luxury tech gifts are the ultimate way to impress. Combining innovation, practicality, and indulgence, they can also be thoughtful, if not showstopping. This year, we’ve curated an extraordinary selection of luxury tech gadgets and devices that deliver cutting-edge tech while adding a touch of luxe to everyday life. They're not just tools -- they're experiences designed to elevate and inspire your gift recipient’s life.

Whether you’re shopping for a coffee connoisseur, a fitness enthusiast, or the ultimate tech junkie, there’s a luxury tech gadget on our list for anyone you're shopping for. Imagine gifting the sleek Terra Kaffe for barista-quality drinks at home or the Meta Quest 3S for immersive virtual adventures. For the audiophile, Focal’s high-fidelity headphones redefine sound quality, while the Hydrow Core Rower offers an immersive fitness adventure like no other. Even cat parents and homebodies can indulge in next-level convenience with the Litter-Robot 4 or Shark PowerDetect vacuum.

Read more
The Lenovo Legion 5i with RTX 4060 is 37% off for Cyber Week
The Lenovo Legion 5i laptop with the Legion logo on the screen.

Often the home of great gaming laptop deals, Lenovo has a particularly great one for anyone keen to game in style this holiday season. Today, you can buy the Lenovo Legion 5i with a 16-inch screen for just $1,121, meaning you’re saving 37% or $669 off the regular price. It's a hefty price cut, but it’s worth remembering that Lenovo’s estimated value system means that sometimes the original price is optimistically high. But the discounted price is still great either way. One of the better laptop deals around, the Lenovo Legion 5i looks great and packs plenty of punch for the price. Here’s why you’ll want it.

Why you should buy the Lenovo Legion 5i
Lenovo is one of the best gaming laptop brands around and my personal favorite of the bunch. Having owned an older Lenovo Legion laptop for a number of years, I’d happily recommend the range for anyone seeking a reliable gaming laptop. With the Lenovo Legion 5i, you get a great upgrade to my four-year-old Lenovo Legion. It has a 14th-generation Intel Core i7-14650HX CPU and it’s teamed up with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD storage. The highlight here is its Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card with 8GB of dedicated VRAM. It’s the best graphics card in this price range dodging the downfall of the weaker 4050 GPU.

Read more
Experiment showcases 3D dental scanner capable of running Counter-Strike: Source
Counter Strike: Source running on a 3D dental scanner

One would assume that medical equipment is not as capable as a modern PC. However, in a surprising and creative tech experiment, Redditor u/AfternoonPutrid8558 demonstrated how Counter-Strike: Source could be played on a 3D dental scanner. The system, equipped with an old Intel processor and AMD GPU, proved surprisingly capable of running the popular first-person shooter at an impressive 600 to 700 frames per second (fps).

The post has gained a bit of attention on the r/pcmasterrace subreddit, highlighting the creative potential of reusing older hardware for gaming. The tech enthusiast repurposed the dental scanner’s hardware, which featured an older 5th-gen Intel Core i7-5720K and an MSI Raider X99 motherboard running at 3.3GHz with 32GB of DDR4-2999 RAM.

Read more