Saill White <saill.white@openlina.com> writes:
This part of what Mr. Hovsepian said does not make any sense:
Novell has a significant patent portfolio, and in reflection of this fact, the agreement we signed shows the overwhelming balance of payments being from Microsoft to Novell
At last count, Microsoft has 5834 US patents, Novell has 279.
You can check this yourself by going here and typing an/microsoft then an/novell in the query box:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.htm
If each company's payment receive for "patent protection" is proportional to the number of patents that company holds, as Mr. Hovsepian implies, Novell should have paid Microsoft more than 20 times the amount that Microsoft paid Novell.
It's not so easy.
Either Mr. Hovsepian is confused or he would still rather not explain the reason for the large payment from Microsoft to Novell.
The amount of payments in a patent-related situation are a function of two variables: the strength of the claims in the patents held and the value of the infringing business. Novell has a very strong patent portfolio, and Microsoft generates a lot of revenue for its products, and both of these items are factors in determining the payment amounts, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, aj@suse.de, http://www.suse.de/~aj/ SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126