The deal that would have helped OpenVision Inc pick up the pieces once Novell Inc’s Unix Systems Group decided not to honour its Distributed Manager pacts, has itself fallen over, said to be weighted down by Unix Systems Group demands. The situation has so provoked Unisys Corp that it is said to be thinking about suing Novell. Unisys, Pyramid Technology Corp and Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG were the applications providers in Distributed Manager, a derivative of the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Management Environment (DME 1.5) that Unix Systems Group’s predecessor, Unix System Labs, bought outright (but only for System V.4 systems), then spent considerable money and manpower reworking. Unix Systems Group, distracted by parent Novell’s Distributed Management Services scheme, is now no longer interested in Distributed Manager. Yet just before OpenVision, said to be backed by the applications providers, was to step in and salvage things, Unix Systems Group appears to have changed the terms of their understanding, insisting that they adhere more closely to the Distributed Manager framework, derived from an early Tivoli Systems Inc rendition, for a longer period of time than they were willing to do, and offering OpenVision only a non-exclusive deal, requiring two years of support, maintenance and extensions plus passing financial obligations through. OpenVision found these terms unappetising, but Unix Systems Group is said to have made no attempt to mitigate them in the month the deal has been in limbo. Pyramid, meanwhile, is said to be owed a substantial amount of money.
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