One of the reasons Timpanogas Inc chief executive Jeff Merkey left Novell Inc to found his own company was sexual harassment, according to our sister publication ClieNT Server News. Merkey, the chief architect of Novell’s Wolf Mountain advanced clustering software, filed charges of sexual harassment against Novell and its Internet products group senior vice president Denice Gibson with the State of Utah last week, according to the newsletter. Merkey, it is alleged, was forced to leave the company after he turned down Gibson’s advances and Novell failed to deal with his complaint properly. The Wolf Mountain project was later moved under Gibson’s charge, exacerbating the situation, according to ClieNT Server News. At one stage, Novell is said to have sanctioned the idea of spinning off the Wolf Mountain team to end the internal conflict, but that idea was scotched with the arrival of new chief executive Eric Schmidt. Merkey quit in April and created the provocatively named Wolf Mountain Group, which was instantly sued by Novell (CI No 3,149, 3154). Novell even went as far as getting a court order or writ of replevin to search the homes of Merkey and Darren Major, the chief architect of Novell’s Unified File Object Directory. Replevin is now the code name of Timanogas’ clustering software, a fault-tolerant, scalable cross-platform layer that will initially be implemented as a layer on top of Windows NT.
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