Novell Inc is now intending to make the Great Unix Giveaway in mid-month, October 11 being a likely ecumenical date – it is is untinged by any Novell-dominated event such as NetWorld in Dallas which precedes it by a week – or fallout from the Unix strategy briefing on September 21 where it was originally supposed to happen. Novell is determined to proceed with its plan to hand the licensing of Unix over to an independent body (CI No 2,267) and is hurriedly making whatever concessions it must to the Big Three firms, Sun Microsystems Inc, IBM Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co, to effect it.
Malleable
Sources say a more malleable Novell is now willing to abandon its insistence that UnixWare be allowed to be non-compliant with the proposed X/Open Co Ltd Portability Guide branding scheme or that Novell itself be allowed to exercise a veto power over the future direction of Unix. The source code will also be called Unix, not UnixWare. To use the Unix trademark, vendors will have to use the word Unix somewhere in their product name. Sun has already said it will offer Solaris as the best implementation of Unix. What will happen to AIX or HP-UX has yet to be determined. For its efforts, Novell is likely to be allowed free membership in X/Open, the proposed keeper of the Unix flame (although there will be new money from elsewhere to fund this and other X/Open projects), and Novell will still collect royalties on the code. The royalties have still apparently not been adjusted to reflect current events. Companies such as SunSoft Inc, for instance, say they have taken no code or even bug fixes from Unix System Laboratories Inc in over two years. A memorandum of understanding was being worked up at the end of last week which is said to have a cash-by date of October 11. After that, all the papers go to the lawyers. X/Open is keen that any announcement should be much more low-key than the embarrassingly vacuous event that took place in New York on September 21.
