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Novell Proclaims 'We're Not SCO' and We Won't Sue

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the well-thank-goodness-for-all-that-then dept.

E5Rebel writes "Novell has promised not to sue anybody over the Unix copyrights that a US court last week ruled it owned. They said there was no Unix in Linux and now they are sticking by it. Perhaps they had no option, but Novell deserve praise for taking on the fight with SCO...."

2 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A promise is... by Aim+Here · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sure is. I take it you're being sarcastic, but you really are precluded from suing someone if they rely on your promise not to sue them. The legal doctrine is called 'promissory estoppel' and has been invoked by IBM in the SCO case already, IIRC.

  2. Re:I believe them... by tbird20d · · Score: 5, Informative

    A lot of people may not know that one of the reasons Caldera was started in the first place (SCO's parent) was that Ransom Love recuited a load of engineers to get Zen works to run on Linux. Internally, Novell rejected the idea after they saw a massively failed WordPerfect on Linux project, and thought they had better stay clear of alternative OS's for a while.

    Whoa! That's not how I remember it, and I was one of the original employees of Caldera. Caldera was started by Bryan Sparks, who recruited Ransom and other Novell people to spin out "Secret Project X" into its own standalone startup. "Secret Project X" was a Novell project to create a *nix-based desktop OS, using Linux as the base OS. Bryan has tried to do this with UnixWare, but ran into problems.

    Novell rejected the idea of building a Linux-based desktop OS in 1993, which was too bad. It was a bit galling to see Novell get back into the Linux business a full 10 years later, after squandering what could have been an early lead. The decision pre-dated Windows 95, which was arguably where the Redmond Windows monopoly began, so history could have been different.

    Would-a, Could-a, Should-a...