The following is from PowerPC News; Vol.2 , No.36 30th, August 1995.
(See the end of this post for more info about PowerPC News in general.)
 
UNIX FUTURE UP IN AIR; PRICE IS WRONG FOR HEWLETT
(August 28th 1995) Hewlett-Packard Co has confirmed that it is talking
to Novell Inc about the future of the Unix System, which Novell bought
from AT&T Corp a couple of years ago. But Hewlett-Packard Co's Bernard
Guidon told our sister paper Unigram.X that there had been a plethora of
wide-ranging discussions about the future of Unix and nothing
substantive was in place yet.
 
Rumours had it that Hewlett-Packard would acquire Unix. Without
identifying what was on the table, Guidon noted that the wishes and
concerns of other vendors such as Sun Microsystems Inc and IBM Corp had
to be taken into account and that any agreement to unburden Novell of
its load would also have to be acceptable to Unix trade mark owner
X/Open Co Ltd and the Open Software Foundation. He suggested that the
price of taking on Unix in terms of any payment to Novell and the
ensuing research and development would be too high. There's not enough
of a strategic reason, he said, for the company to buy Unix, claiming
that it was ahead of the pack now without having that cross to bear. He
agreed that some form of consolidation is inevitable - and that
consolidation is what interests Intel Corp, which supposedly was urging
Hewlett-Packard to acquire Unix - but that the form of such a
consolidation has yet to gel. He was sure Novell is offering Unix and
associated technologies in many different combinations and to many
parties. Meanwhile, suggestions have been raised that Hewlett-Packard
may be considering buying out the royalty stream it has to pay Novell in
exchange for a paid-up licence to Unix, just as Sun did, while old Unix
hands say they are begining to get a slight sense of deja vu and are
reminded of the early days of the Hamilton Group, which evolved into the
Open Software Foundation.
(C) Computergram International
 
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  Software al dente, Inc.
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