CPTN Holdings LLC is a consortium of technology companies led by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

that acquired a portfolio of 882

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...

s as part of the sale of Novell to Attachmate. As of December 2010, CPTN's members are believed to be

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

, Oracle and

EMC Corporation Dell EMC (EMC Corporation until 2016) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts and Round Rock, Texas, United States. Dell EMC sells data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, clo ...

. It was later reported that the Rücknahme, the filing with the German Federal Cartel Office by the principals of CPTN Holdings was withdrawn on December 30, 2010, after letters of protest were filed by Open Source advocates. However, other sources indicate that the filing was only delayed to raise more funds.CPTN Holdings is still trying to buy Novell's patents
/ref> The U.S. Department of Justice announced that in order to proceed with the first phase of their acquisition of certain patents and patent applications from Novell Inc., CPTN Holdings LLC and its owners altered their original agreements to address the department's antitrust concerns. The department said that, as originally proposed, the deal would jeopardize the ability of open source software, such as Linux, to continue to innovate and compete in the development and distribution of server, desktop, and mobile operating systems, middleware, and virtualization products. With regard to licensing the patents: * All the Novell patents will be acquired subject to the GNU General Public License,

Version 2 Version may refer to: Computing * Software version, a set of numbers that identify a unique evolution of a computer program * VERSION (CONFIG.SYS directive), a configuration directive in FreeDOS Music * Cover version * Dub version * Remix * ' ...

, a widely adopted open-source license, and the Open Invention Network (OIN) License, a significant license for the Linux System; * CPTN does not have the right to limit which of the patents, if any, are available under the OIN license; and * Neither CPTN nor its owners will make any statement or take any action with the purpose of influencing or encouraging either Novell or Attachmate to modify which of the patents are available under the OIN license.

References

Microsoft subsidiaries Novell {{US-corp-stub