After being slapped with a lawsuit for “slander of title” by the SCO Group Inc. on Tuesday, Novell Inc.’s CEO Jack Messman on Wednesday declared the company would defend itself against the suit and win, citing the suit as evidence that SCO is losing the war it launched against Linux when it filed suit against IBM for allegedly infringing upon its Unix patent.
“This lawsuit illustrates that SCO’s campaign against enterprise adoption of Linux is foundering. It seems that litigation has now become SCO’s principal line of business. Certainly, it is now deeply mired in the legal process. As a result of this latest SCO action, Novell finds itself in good company with IBM and Red Hat, both of whom are also in litigation with SCO. Because this matter is now in the courts, we will not comment further, except to say that Novell intends to vigorously defend the lawsuit. In the meantime, we will continue to pursue our Linux initiatives and serve the needs of our customers,” Messman said.
SCO owns the intellectual property rights to Unix, and contends that Linux stole has some derivative Unix code in its kernel. As a result, SCO would like organizations and individuals using Linux to pay it a licensing fee. The matter is still before the courts.
This suit came one day before the start of the LinuxWorld Expo in New York, which kicked off Wednesday sparking a whole slew of announcements from Novell.
The company announced it will join Eclipse — an open source integrated development environment (IDE) — which Novell is standardizing on to provide a common platform for users to build on its technologies. This means developers can use the same development environment regardless of programming language, development framework or operating system, Novell said.
Novell also announced that its GroupWise 6.5 for Linux is available for open beta. The platform will be supporting Ximian Evolution e-mail and workgroup information management, and a plug-in for the GAIM Instant Messenger client, and is supported by SuSE AG’s Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Inc.’s Enterprise Linux distributions.
The company also extended Linux support to its exteNd 5 — an application suite that enables users to create Web services platforms. Some enhancements include the ability to create portlets without writing code, instead users can employ visual development tools, support for the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) XForms 1.0 specification for Web forms, and the Portlet 1.0 specification which allows for interoperability between different vendors.
ExteNd 5 will also support Red Hat and SuSE Linux.
But Novell’s Linux integration doesn’t stop there: the company also announced its Ximian Red Carpet Enterprise software can now support IBM Corp.’s eServer systems, and zSeries mainframes. This means the company can use Red Carpet to centralize, automate and maintain these servers in the data centre.
