According to FOSS Patents’s Florian Mueller, Microsoft, Apple, EMC, and Oracle have teamed up as CPTN Holdings LLC in order to purchase 882 Novell patents for $445 million dollars. The list of players obviously includes a lot of heavy-weight companies, but there’s very little known about what the new consortium will do with the patents.
Muller pointed out back in November that Novell does not have 882 patents registered to its name, and that the purchase may include some patent applications. It’s also unclear how the patent pie will be sliced between Microsoft, Apple, EMC, and Oracle, or what their intentions are with the patents.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out, and how it influences the Novell sale.
This news also might influence Apple’s bidding for a large number of Nortel patents. It might seem like Apple’s spending a lot of money on patents, but it’s only going to result in a small dent in that multi-billion dollar Apple war-chest in Cupertino.
Article Via Foss Patents
