Ximian Acquired By Novell

That would be difficult. If all the developers had assigned the copyright for their contributed code to Ximian, then Novell/Ximian could do that easily, but I haven't known Ximian to use that practice. Remember the relicensing fiaso over Mozilla going GPL? There were no copyright assignments made, so for the project to relicense to the GPL, they had to contact every contributor and get their approval.