Apple, Microsoft, Oracle partner to acquire Novell patents for $450M - Page 2

Ubuntu can't afford it. Red Hat is in the red and Google isn't a FOSS haven.

This is great news.

Thank you for explaining this (yet again) to those that continuously harp on about that investment. It seems that myth will never die in the MS fan base.

Apple made a $800 million loss in 1996 and $1 billion loss in 1997. One billion in cash wouldn't have lasted them long, but neither would a $150 million "bailout" from Microsoft. The largest contribution was probably the vote of confidence from Microsoft and the promise of Office and Internet Explorer.

It was the restructuring of Apple. The excessive and directionless R&D. The acquisition of NEXT. The legal expense with Microsoft. The removal of 'leeching' third party mac manufacturers. The slimming down of Apples device range. And the return of Jobs which 'lost' Apple much of that cash but which also returned them to profit.

The largest vote of confidence was in the return of Jobs, the return of vision, a faultless long term strategy based round NEXT and at long last a replacement for OS8 which was showing it's age and zapping the confidence.


Microsoft's contribution (other than reduced legal expenses) was very little in the grand scheme of things. History became distorted by that stupid film Pirates of Silicon Valley.

You don't GPL patents. GPL is a copyright license -- not a usage license.

The copyright on the content of all patents and patent applications belongs to the public domain by default, so there is no need for a GPL-type license to grant permission for anybody to duplicate or redistribute the text of the patents.

What matters to patents is permission to make use of the patented information to build a marketable product -- and that comes from a very different type of license.

I suppose the sensationalist storyline would be that these four have got together to get at Google. I'm not aware of any history between EMC and Google but the other 3 certainly have axes to grind.

However, it's more likely that some of these patents have already been in use for sometime by at least some, if not all, of the four. The logic then being to split the costs 4 ways and avoid being sued at some point in the future by patent trolls.

I'm curious to know what the patents are.

Fascinating. If only one had a crystal ball. I wouldn't be sitting here typing this. Actually i probably would

Sure, they were hemorrhaging money at the time, but as you say, the $150 million from Microsoft didn't make a significant difference in financial terms. (Though it's been suggested that more cash changed hands behind the scenes, it probably wasn't a huge sum.) The "vote of confidence" thing was a triumph of stagecraft, more smoke and mirrors than reality. I think Jobs deserves a lot more credit for engineering this than he gets or got. At the time, everyone was so used to the concept of Microsoft always winning that the deal was spun as just another instance, when in reality Apple got just what it needed -- a little breathing room and an opportunity to move forward. The rest is history.

For sure.



Stranger things have happened. Technology, like politics, makes strange "co-opetition" bedfellows, so even granted that this new consortium is a pre-emptive move on Apple's Google front, nothing prevents Apple and Goog from their own joint venture.

Not holding my breath for this to happen, tho'.


MS also has a long history of sabotaging Novell and notably, some of its one time components, WordPerfect, Paradox and Quattro Pro (playing especially dirty pool with WordPerfect) - all of which Novell acquired and cobbled together into WordPefect Office (since sold to Corel at a big loss) when it attempted - and failed - to go head to head with MS in both OS's and Office suites.

Novell also acquired DR's DOS - which was the "good DOS" IBM was also interested in when it struck that fateful deal with Bill Gates - who in turn had to purchase his code from another small Seattle company. Myth has it that the DR DOS guy was out flying his plane when the IBM reps visited his company and they felt flipped off. On such small hinges turn great doors. We'd certainly be living in a different digital world today.

The costly attempt also drained Novell's resources and left it bereft of strategic directions. But it's also hard to say what a better strategy - other than selling itself to MS - or possibly Sun - when the handwriting was appearing on the wall - might have been in retrospect.

MS really only began to "play nice" with Novell once the company was nearing the life support stage, in my memory at least, but interoperability was also a wedge for MS into the remaining Netware sites. "Co-opetition" was a phrase I believe Gates coined to describe its early relationships with ISV's, projecting an image of partners marching together into the future all making big bucks. However, as the trail of corporate corpses, walking dead and goobled up bits of WordPerfect, Lotus, Ashton-Tate, Borland and so many others testifies, co-opetition with the owner of the dominant OS is at best a double-edged sword. And from the early days of PC software, only Adobe and Intuit are relatively major companies still standing on their own. (Some Apple ISV's have learned this too, e.g., Konquerer and the Watson-Sherlock fandango.)

Novell latched onto Unix and Suse in a last ditch attempt to re-invent itself, and migrate its own base to a more viable and extensible platform.

Which meant eventually essentially killing its own Netware OS to put everything on SUSE plumbing and try to play in the emerging GPL/Open Source market. Messy at their level and also for their remaining base. I don't follow them anymore tho', so don't know what Attachmate's doing with the assets it hasn't divested.

Novell lost it when they chickened out in the 90's and the week before Comdex failed to announce NDS for NT as a stand-alone product that didn't require Netware.

It sealed their doom. As soon as I heard they had backtracked on their expected announcement, I didn't upgrade my CNE for Netware 4 and instead started studying for my MCSE instead.

And we are still stuck with Active Directory which, even today, isn't half the directory service that Novell Directory Services (NDS) was in the 90's. Try to partition your AD forest and replicate only portions of it - it's ridiculous what people put up with....

Thanks for nothing Novel. Damn cowards....

You do realise that Microsoft is the biggest provider of software for the Mac after Apple themselves right?

Microsoft and Apple work very closely together, and are definitely not enemies on most levels. They have a common enemy however in Google, which brings them even closer.

The only people that this deal is bad for is the consumer because this deal will allow these companies to move forward but block others giving people less choice.

And when picking the Novell carcass, please tell me how they decide which company gets which patent?

I still believe that Microsoft wants to keep Apple from obtaining the patents to technologies that could potentially unseat M$ in the enterprise.

Some Novell technolgies are superior to what Apple can offer: NDS and Groupwise. Novell and Microsoft have an email server. Apple does not. Open Directory is a very primitive, barely usable version of Microsoft's Active Directory. Microsoft admins can use Ghost for disk imaging. What does Apple have for multi-casting disk images. Carbon Copy Cloner is nice, but it only copies one disk at a time. Xserves are gone without a replacement. Why is there no Mac in the server room?

When will Apple wake up and address the above issues?