WebProNews

Utah-based tech concern Novell picks up 39 valuable business to business and web services patents from their bankrupt owner.

Novell plays white knight to the open source community, in a fashion, by acquiring Commerce One's patents and patent applications.

The patents covered valuable technologies like that underlying the OASIS Universal Business Language standards.

Many in the open source community feared a new patent owner would immediately turn to its lawyers and start extorting licensing fees from users of the technology derived from some of the patents.

A consortium of open source interests under the umbrella of CommerceNet tried to acquire the patents and applications with the purpose of retiring them and removing the threat of legal action. But their attempt was not successful

Novell, however, seems content to fulfill that purpose themselves. Public relations at the Orem, Utah firm state the patents will be used defensively and not for generating a licensing revenue stream.

"We have a stated policy that we will use our patents to defend our open-source offerings against potential patent challenges by others," Lowry said. "The acquisition of the Commerce One patents strengthens our ability to do so."

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.