If on-going negotiations come to fruition, Novell Inc chief executive Ray Noorda will probably stun the business world this week by announcing that he is giving away Unix, his recent $320m purchase, to X/Open Co Ltd, the UK-based industry consortium that specifies open systems standards. X/Open will become responsible for the Unix specification, trademark and branding – not overnight, perhaps but over the next year or two. The drastic move, apparently decided on in the last few days and kept a closely-guarded secret, indicates the lengths Noorda to which is willing to go to foil his arch-rival Bill Gates and the Microsoft Corp empire personified by Windows NT. It is Noorda’s trump card to get the fractious computer industry to rally behind Unix and Novell’s volume Unix strategy, to wit UnixWare. A participant in the negotiations claims the move is a result of demands made on Novell by key Unix OEM customers, particularly IBM Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and Sun Microsystems Inc, and derives from their recent attempts to educate Noorda, a refugee from the proprietary camp, to the facts of Unix and open systems life. It is at least a halfway house between their reported desire for an equity interest in Unix and Novell’s attempts to retain control. By turning Unix over to X/Open and giving the industry at large – or at least some part of it – rather than a single company or an elite group of corporate shareholders a shot at determining its future direction, Noorda ultimately hopes to realise that long-sought but elusive dream of a unified Unix. While Noorda, however, may still harbour vestiges of the notion of a single Unix, the vendors are thought to want only a single specification and multiple implementations to ensure the continued versatility of the operating system. Otherwise, one of them said, we’d be better off picking up NT – it’s a better system – but we’re getting early indications that accounts are getting tired of being told what to do by the likes of Micro soft. Details and back ground – see page 3 inside
