Perhaps dealing a blow to Sun Microsystems Inc’s hopes of snaring another Fujitsu Ltd affiliate for its Solaris Unix, ICL Plc last week said it would take source code direct from Novell Inc and make its existing DRS/NX Unix operating system compatible with it. ICL claims users have been crying out for just the kind of NetWare-Unix integration that Novell outlined for UnixWare last month, and says it will offer all of its value-added DRS/NX features, and more, in the system it eventually implements. ICL, which provided the reference implementation of Unix System V.4 for Sun’s Sparc RISC, says it is negotiating with Novell to do the same for UnixWare – not something likely to go down a storm in Mountain View. Furthermore, as its Fujitsu parent helped develop the multiprocessing features of its Unix System V.4.2 implementation, ICL says the Japanese firm will offer it the same support in its UnixWare efforts. ICL sells Sun workstations where the customer needs to run computer-aided design and other technical applications, and thinks that is where the strengths of Solaris lie, and not in the commercial client-server world. Meanwhile, ICL sister company Amdahl Corp has thrown its lot in with Sun’s battle with UnixWare, last week agreeing to help integrate features of its UTS mainframe Unix into Solaris and signing to OEM the Sun operating system and Sparc servers
