Novell Inc, as reported, last week failed to deliver on a premature promise to turn the Unix brand and specification over to the X/Open Co standards body. It did, however, indicate its resolve to do so as quickly as possible, without publicly naming X/Open as the recipient. The non-event turned Novell’s packed Tuesday strategy briefing and its Unix Expo keynote into a rather juiceless recap of how it will integrate NetWare and UnixWare and make UnixWare a volume player. The setback was apparently due to Novell’s inability to close the loop in time to make the announcement with either X/Open or the Unix vendors with whom it has been in discussions, namely Sun Microsystems Inc, IBM Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co. Novell, however, including chief executive Ray Noorda, privately sought to lay the blame elsewhere, labelling SunSoft Inc president Ed Zander the spoiler. We were working through the issues from A to Z and when we got to Z, Noorda said meaning Zander, we started having trouble. IBM and Hewlett-Packard were cast as meekly following Sun’s lead and preferring to act in concert. Novell says Zander rehashed issues that were resolved three months ago and complained about the unfair advantage Novell had in the use of the UnixWare name, objecting to Novell’s notion that both the source and binary should be called the same thing.

Alleged clout

(Truth be told, this whole flap and the spin doctoring that has followed in its wake has created an enormous amount of confusion in the industry right now, leaving a lot of people wondering what the heck is going on). Zander, in disbelief over his own alleged clout, vehemently denied he acted the heavy, claiming it is a cagey attempt by a wily Novell to divide and conquer the tightly bound Common Open Software Environment group that the Big Three started back in March. He said Ray Noorda himself actually called the thing off for lack of time during a conference call on Monday September 20, the day before it was to be made public. He also claimed that Novell didn’t need the Big Three’s backing to make the announcement and could have gone ahead with it anyway, while at the same time noting a need for consensus among the power brokers. Novell, for its part, claimed the deal was all locked up and signed off on by everyone concerned until Friday September 17 (ironically the day our sister paper Unigram.X broke the story), when Zander told a conference call that he needed more time, hung up the phone and became unavailable for the rest of the day and the ensuing weekend – even to Noorda who was reportedly called in to intervene. Zander says that this is patently untrue. There were no calls placed over the weekend and everyone on the Friday call including Hewlett-Packard’s Workstation Systems Group general manager Gary Eichhorn and IBM’s Advanced Workstations & Systems Division president Bill Filip were equally obstreperous and concerned over the issues still left unresolved. Other parties in the discussions, although this is denied by Zander, say the nub of the matter rests with Novell trying to get as much of NetWare as it can into the specification. (Zander says Novell can’t do it because the spec is the 1170 API plus Common Desktop Environment). And there are numerous other unresolved issues out there on the periphery.

By Maureen O’Gara, William Fellows and John Abbott

There was, for instance, nothing in writing with X/Open, and there remain questions over how the trademark will be funded, who will ante up and how much, what will constitute Unix, who owns what, where, and similar issues of intellectual property, Novell’s proposed three-year veto rights, and how they would square with X/Open’s charter, the extent to which X/Open’s prized vendor-independent machine-independent charter would have to be rewritten to accommodate the new mission, points of international law, Novell’s demand for free membership and whether the Unix trademark, which some claim AT&T Co policed badly, would prove too difficult to manage. X/Open member companies, which expressed concern over how X/

Open’s technical staff – already stretched to cover COSE and the 1170 API – will be allocated, and they also say the organisation’s independent software vendor and user groups don’t want X/Open to get involved. They also indicate that some of the 14 X/Open member companies might find the prospect equally unappetising. Novell executives are adamant that the deal will be done, and executive vice-president Kanwal Rehki, head of the new Unix Systems Group, said an announcement won’t wait more than another two weeks. SunSoft’s Zander, who was travelling last week and arrived late at Unix Expo, which imposed an additional demand on everyone’s time, said he was unaware that the call was scheduled and would be on an airplane. Noorda’s executive team last week was practically unanimous in advising him to go ahead with the announcement anyway. He resisted the temptation at the Tuesday briefing session, where, it is said, 19 representatives from supporting companies were intended to gather on stage with him, and were warned off at the last minute. He did answer a direct question from the press rather sketchily, albeit affirmatively, saying he was in charge of obfuscation. The next day at the Unix Expo keynote speech, Unix Systems Group marketing vice-president Bob Davis, who gave most of the speech in Noorda’s place, went further, but still offered only a rough outline. The third-party organisation that inherits the Unix brand does not necessarily have to be X/Open, Novell people said, and if its conditions prove overbearing, some other entity will be formed or chosen. Unix International is believed to be anxious to take on the job, but past associations may rule it out. The move to turn the Unix spec and trademark over to a neutral watchdog on the surface seems a constructive, if radical, gesture to heal some of the Unix fragmentation. Novell would like to see the fissures disappear completely, and for all the talk of one specification-multiple implementations the Big Three are so fond of, it is clearly still intent on trying to achieve not only one specification but one implementation namely UnixWare.

Harsh words

This is where SunSoft’s Zander, who has nothing but harsh words to say about the UnixWare code, draws the line, and says that he (and by implication IBM and Hewlett-Packard as well) was stunned finally to realise in that Friday telephone call that the only source code that is still on offer from Novell is the UnixWare source, a bitter pill to swallow after Novell, turning its back on its original statements of intent, he suggested, immediately dismembered Unix System Laboratories Inc as soon as it acquired it, integrated it quickly into Novell, dropped Unix Labs president Roel Pieper, absorbed marketing and acted on its plans to offer binary code in competition with its OEM customers. The Big Three at least are panicked at the prospect that Novell, originally heralded as the saviour of Unix, is quickly adopting the Microsoft model, shared only by Intel. It seems the process of compromise by which the firms were to reach an agreemet on a spec to pass up to X/Open was short-circuited by Novell’s desire to have a done deal on the table by the time of its Unix Expo keynote – and the subsequent chicken and egg reasoning commenced. While Sun said it would not hesitate to support a Unix trademark, despite its heavy investment in marketing the Solaris brand – we’d simply sell Solaris as the best Unix implementation, said chief executive Scott McNealy – Novell cannot give up a Unix spec that isn’t supported by the Big Three. On the other hand, Sun et al won’t lend their support to a spec that would mean they’d have to give up too much of their respective operating system enhancements in favour of Novell technologies.