The Corsair project at Novell Inc to build a desktop operating environment around the Linux public domain Unixalike may have been killed by new chief executive Robert Frankenberg, but it refuses to lie down and die. It was to have included the Novell DOS 7 alternative to MS-DOS and an interface to Mosaic and the World Wide Web, and according to PC Week, two camps inside Novell Inc, one lead by chairman Ray Noorda, the other by Frankenberg, are debating decide whether to spin it off into a new company of use its technology in other Novell products. Frankenberg is said to want the Corsoft group to focus on making Corsair an operating environment that would run on top of Windows, OS/2, System 7, and UnixWare, and does not want the group to do any further development with the Linux public-domain Unix. But others are particularly interested in the Mosaic Internet front-end clone, code-named Ferret, developed by Novell and built into Corsair, sources told the paper. Frankenberg says he doesn’t want to be in the desktop business, a source close to Novell, who declined to be identified, told the paper. He wants to be friends with Microsoft – and that makes Noorda nervous. But Frankenberg doesn’t want to lose the Corsoft guys they’re some of Novell’s best engineers. He gave them carte blanche to go anywhere else and do anything else they want inside Novell. But he isn’t going to fund Corsair. Corsair is still an experimental technology, and Novell hasn’t determined what, if anything, we will do with it, said a Novell spokeswoman to the paper.
