Novell Inc has at last broken its silence over the loss of its Wolf Mountain advanced clustering research and development team (CI No 3,149). In a statement issued at the end of last week, Novell said it had filed suit against the Wolf Mountain Group and three current or former employees of Novell: Jeff Merkey, Larry Angus and Darren Major, citing breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, misappropriation of trade secrets, trademark infringement and conversion. Novell also says that the defendents are using Novell’s proprietary information in building a business competitive with Novell. The company won a temporary restraining order precluding the defendents from using any Novell assets or proprietary information in the conduct of their business. As a result, the Wolf Mountain Group has closed its Web site, and are not presently allowed to use the Wolf Mountain designation. Novell denied reports that large numbers of employees were leaving the company to work at the Wolf Mountain Group. It said it currently had 30 to 35 engineers working on the technology. Merkey is credited as the chief architect of the technology, and has been talking of hosting the Wolf Mountain technology on top of Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT, in preference to Novell’s own networking software.
