The announcement of the Unix giveaway – see front page will be made at a specially convened Novell Inc-hosted Unix Strategy Event at the Equitable Center in New York City this morning at 10:30 am and then again the next day during Noorda’s one o’clock keynote speech at Unix Expo. The announcement is expected to draw support from the bulk of the industry including IBM Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co who, Novell people maintain, may even be enticed to throw in their lot with Novell’s anti-Microsoft Corp Unix-on-Intel desktop gambit with UnixWare, something Novell has been seeking. Sources claim however, that the X/Open Co initiative should not be confused with Novell’s UnixWare agenda nor support for one be construed as support for both, an eventuality likely to happen. As we went to press, we heard that the slides for the announcement showing IBM, Digital Equipment Corp and Hewlett-Packard as UnixWare customers were being held back. Sun Microsystems Inc, which because of its own software aspirations in highly critical of UnixWare, said it will never pick up the stuff and neither will Hewlett-Packard or IBM. Doubtless it says that because it has its own counter-offers on the table with Hewlett-Packard and IBM for Solaris x86. It may have trouble winning an IBM deal because IBM wants lots of Open Software Foundation Distributed Computing Environment software included. Sun and its SunSoft planet may, however, pay at least lip service to the Novell policies although Sun’s strategy is overtly in competition with Novell.
