CommerceOne Patent Buyer Turns Out To Be Novell

from the for-secretly-defensive-reasons dept

Late last year, there was some surprise when a secretive company named JGR Acquisitions outbid everyone else to get CommerceOne's sought after e-commerce patents -- keeping them out of the hands of patent hoarder Nathan Myhrvold. Many people have been waiting to see if the new owner would start enforcing those patents, but now it's been revealed that the buyer was actually Novell -- and they bought the patents for "defensive purposes." Since Novell is becoming a much bigger supporter of open source software, it seems they viewed the $15.5 million that went into buying these patents as a sort of insurance fund against a SCO-style lawsuit against their open source offerings. In other words, that's $15.5 million wasted on nuclear stockpiling, rather than actual investment in research and development -- but the patent office still doesn't see the need for any real reforms in the patent process.

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