Novell will sell its interest in 882 patents to a consortium led by Microsoft for $450 million, in conjunction with the Linux vendor's separate acquisition by Seattle-based Attachmate Corp. That's one of the more attention-grabbing tidbits in regulatory documents just filed by Novell, providing more details on the deals.

The companies had previously said the agreement involved unspecified "intellectual property assets," without saying how many patents were involved. The filing doesn't describe the patents being purchased by the Microsoft group, but Novell over the years was involved in a wide range of productivity, storage and collaboration technologies in addition to its distribution of the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system.

Read Novell's full filing with the SEC here.

Earlier this morning, Microsoft confirmed its involvement in the deal but declined to detail the IP assets or name its partners in the consortium, a group identified by the companies as CPTN Holdings LLC.

Microsoft and Novell have been partners since 2006 in a deal that gave their respective customers protection from ligitation over each company's patent holdings. Novell representatives haven't yet responded to a request for more details on the sale of the patents to the Microsoft consortium.

Previously: Attachmate buying Novell for $2.2 billion, Microsoft group gets IP