News is coming in that Novell is being bought out by Attachmate for about US$2.2 billion along with Novell’s “intellectual properties” (patents, trademarks, copyrights) being sold to some consortium called CPTN Holdings LLC.  For some reason, CPTN Holdings LLC does not seem to have a web presence of their own. BTW, Attachmate.com seems to be down right now (2330 SGT/1530GMT Nov 22 2010).

I can only speculate as to what the sale of the patents/copyrights to CPTN will mean.  The monies they pay out would want to be recouped which will mean that they will become aggressive in their patent litigation efforts.  I think it is time NOW to ban software patents once and for all.