Novell’s headquarters is returning to Provo, where it was born 32 years ago

The privately held Attachmate Group of Houston announced Wednesday it has completed its $2.2 billion purchase of Novell Inc., the Utah-founded technology company that remains one of the state’s largest high-tech operations.

The deal was announced late last year after Novell had put itself up for sale in the wake of an unsolicited offer to buy the company. It closed Wednesday morning, and Novell’s shares ceased trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange at the close of business.

Novell was founded in 1979 in Provo as Novell Data Systems. Its headquarters was moved to Waltham, Mass., in 2004.

Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn said Wednesday that Novell will now operate as two separate business units under the Novell and SUSE names.

“We are once again establishing Provo as the headquarters of the Novell unit,” said Hawn, with some employees remaining in Massachusetts and other offices…

With deal done, Novell returns to Provo roots

Novell has completed its sale to Attachmate and with it around 850 patents to CPTN Holdings.

Novell had announced the $2.2 billion sale of the firm to Attachmate along with a separate sale of “certain intellectual property assets” to CPTN Holdings, a consortium led by Microsoft, back in November 2010. In February Novell shareholders approved the deal, meaning yesterday was the final day that Novell was traded as a public company on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the US.

The sale of Novell to Attachmate wasn’t particularly contentious, however the $450 million sale of its assets that included Unix patents to a consortium that included Microsoft and Apple led to widespread concern that a new wave of litigation was on the horizon. Novell had won a lengthy court battle with SCO to show that it owned certain UNIX copyrights and it was thought that by handing its patent portfolio over to a Microsoft-led consortium, SCO’s legal fiasco might reappear under a different guise with another set of protagonists.

So great was the concern that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) waded in, hobbling the CPTN member firms’ ability to file patent infringement lawsuits based on Novell’s patents. CPTN will essentially sell back to Attachmate the patents that it acquires in the deal, with Attachmate licensing Novell’s patents for use by the members of CPTN.

The open source community owes a debt of gratitude to Novell for its robust defence against SCO and its backers, and now with the DoJ’s help this deal should mean that even with a Microsoft-led consortium paying $450 million for important software patents, it won’t be able to use them to scare people off from or attack Linux…

Attachmate completes its acquisition of Novell (The Inquirer)

See also:

Novell Completes Merger with Attachmate and Patent Sale to CPTN Holdings LLC (Press Release)

US Department of Justice rules that Microsoft will acquire licences for Novell patents rather than ownership

Microsoft will sell patents it proposed to buy from Novell back to Attachmate, which is in the process of acquiring Novell, under a deal with the US Department of Justice (DoJ) concluded last week.

Novell had originally proposed to sell a number of patents to CPTN Holdings, a Microsoft-organised consortium of companies whose owners also include Apple, Oracle and EMC, with the patents then to be distributed among the consortium’s members…

Regulator says Microsoft Must Sell Back Novell Patents

Novell’s sale of hundreds of open-source patents to a consortium featuring Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and EMC has become more likely to go through, as the US Department of Justice has failed to block the sale.

The antitrust division of the Department of Justice (DoJ) had made Novell and the consortium, CPTN Holdings, agree to not carry the sale through until 12 April, so the DoJ could review the sale. In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday, Novell said that date had arrived “without action from the DOJ to enjoin the sale”.

However, Novell pointed out that the DoJ could still challenge the sale of the patents under Section 7 of the Clayton Act “prior to or after any closing of the patent sale”.

German antitrust authorities are still looking at the sale, though…

Novell patent sale clears US regulatory hurdle

A consortium made up of Apple, EMC, Microsoft and Oracle which planned to purchase 882 Novell patents, following Novell’s takeover by Attachmate, has altered its strategy in order to defuse anti-trust concerns. According to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the consortium will only exist for a further three months with the aim of dividing the Novell patents up between its members. All four members will be granted licenses for all of the patents. Microsoft is reported to have undertaken to sell its patents back to Attachmate and retain only the right to use the technologies protected by the patents. Similarly, VMware parent EMC is reported to have agreed not to acquire any of the patents relating to virtualisation…

New developments in Novell patent case