Novell Inc announced yesterday that it will license its NDS Novell Directory Services software royalty-free to hardware and telephone companies, in a last-ditch attempt to flood the market and make it a household name. Directory Services could save the phone companies, Internet access providers and applications vendors from the dirty work of plumbing in their own directory services, and help with provision of value-added services such as telephony over the Internet. Novell vainly hopes Microsoft Corp will license its Directory Services for Windows NT, although, unsurprisingly, Redmond has as yet shown no interest. Microsoft arch-rival Sun Microsystems Inc thinks differently, and has agreed to put Directory Services up under Solaris in the first half of next year. In turn, Novell is licensing several Java based products from Sun – Web NFS, Java Workshop and the Java Just-in-time compiler. Novell has already licensed Sun’s Java Virtual Machine. The two companies will collaborate on the development of Java development tools and Java class libraries. IBM Corp is also thought to be interested in Novell Directory Services.
