DOJ Limits Microsoft's Purchase of Novell Patents 35
itwbennett writes "Novell, distributor of the SUSE Linux OS, has agreed to change its proposed deal to sell patents to CPTN Holdings, a Microsoft-organized consortium of companies, in order to satisfy DOJ concerns about the impact on open-source software, the DOJ said. The agreement will require Microsoft to sell the Novell patents back to Attachmate and Microsoft will receive a license to use those patents and patents acquired by the other three owners of CPTN."
OT: IT World Distractions (Score:5, Informative)
WTF is that damn auto-updating twitterish piece of shit beside the article? It's like they are actively trying to make their site as hard to read as possible. It's worse than most advertisements. Please don't ever link to this website again.
In the meanwhile here is a non-ADD version [itworld.com] of the article.
Re:Should become a standard... (Score:2, Informative)
I suspect that they will get a license PRIOR to it being subject to the GPL2, and may work to allow them to use these unencumbered by the GPL.
There can be multiple licenses for a single patent. There's not need for it to be "prior" it is simply an additional license.