Novell Inc is believed to have prototyped a handful of incarnations of its proposed SuperNOS combined NetWare-UnixWare microkernel hybrid, and is now thought to be a couple of months from an internal reorganisation and redefinition of strategic direction that will give the ambitious project a development shop of its own. Novell is going to change the name too. SuperNOS – we’re saddled with it for now – apparently carries too much negative baggage for Novell’s liking. Specifically, our sister paper Unigram.X has been told to expect integration of the various SuperNOS development teams into a single project unit. There are currently 50-odd engineers attached to the UnixWare-Chorus Systems SA microkernel development and a dozen working on the NetWare integrat ion side. The company still doesn’t appear to know what will feature in the initial release of (not) SuperNOS, which is scheduled for the end of next year, but executives, led by senior NetWare architect Drew Major, are now pushing for a step-by-step approach that would see modular releases and gradual integration of NetWare and UnixWare pieces on a microkernel rather than a full-blown Day One release. Officials are, in any case, now admitting that wholesale integration of the two environments on the microkernel might not be possible at all in the forseeable future, describing that route as too problematic given what is known today and what is likely to turn up further down the road. Having UnixWare technology inside NetWare is seen as crucial if Novell is to make any headway against Microsoft Corp and Windows NT, and the SuperNOS concept appears to have been accepted internally as a way of achieving this goal. The challenge has been, and apparently remains today, to get the NetWare side of the house to buy into the strategy, and for the company to agree on an architectural strategy for getting there. Despite a huge amount of internal debate, insiders say that NetWare folk have never really appreciated what Unix can do, preferring instead to claim that it is stuff that NetWare can already, or could easily, do on its own. Publicly the problem is that Novell is still trying to convince customers and other vendors about technologies it put together ages ago, whereas Microsoft is already selling people on concepts that are still two or three years away. The way it was told to Unigram, SuperNOS is at the point now where Microsoft was when it first started talking about Cairo – which was way back at the end of 1992.
