While for a while it looked like Novell was going to be bought out by VMware, this is not actually the case. Being announced this morning is that Novell is being acquired by Attachmate Corp and Novell will also be offloading some of their intellectual property to a Microsoft technology consortium. Attachmate has dabbled with Linux a bit in the past and was even a sponsor previously of X.Org.

The Microsoft company is buying about $450 million USD worth of IP from Novell while Attachmate Corp is buying up the rest of Novell where combined between the two Novell is being sold for a total price of $2.2 billion USD. Attachmate is a software company owned by three private equity firms: Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital, and Thoma Bravo.

When this deal closes next year, the company will be split into two business units of Attachmate: Novell and SUSE. More details as they come.