Quietly and without fanfare, the Santa Cruz Operation Inc has used some of its spare cash to buy out some Unix technology licences from Novell Inc, buying outright the ones it has been paying for directly, including development tools and other, unspecified pieces of code. The IPX/SPX protocols are already paid in full. The purchase doesn’t include Santa Cruz’s Unix operating system licence – to pre-System V.4 technology – which it gets secondhand from the deal its equity holder Microsoft Corp has with Novell. Microsoft, apparently the proud holder of a comparatively unencumbered Unix licence, is unlikely to buyout its licence as SunSoft Inc did: like other System V.4 licence holders, SunSoft was being kept to what have been described as onerous licensing terms. Indeed terms of the System V.4 binary licence agreement are the main reason Santa Cruz never went that route. OEM and resale restrictions demanded by volume Unix licensing and pricing terms would have been unbearable, it observes. It would have meant, for example, that if Santa Cruz had sold a Unix System V.4 implementation on to say Compaq Computer Corp, and Compaq had then found a bug and fixed it, Santa Cruz would have been in breach of contract. On kernel issues, Santa Cruz says it simply doesn’t have the licensing restrictions that Sun Microsystems Inc faced.
