Novell's planned US$210 million purchase of SuSE Linux AG was the center of a small uproar when the SCO Group made the claim earlier this month that such a team-up would go against the terms of an agreement between the SCO Group and Novell. According to the SCO Group's president and CEO, Darl McBride, Novell explicitly agreed that it would not compete with SCO Group's Unix-on-Intel business when it originally sold its rights to Unix System V source code. The company now known as SCO Group ended up owning Unix V after a series of sales and name changes, and it now claims that it can invoke the non-competition clause in Novell's original contract of sale.

Because Linux is derived from Unix, McBride argued, Novell's acquisition of SuSE Linux would violate the terms of that agreement.

SCO Group, of course, has been engaged in rowdy legal battles with IBM, claiming that Big Blue added Unix code to Linux and thus violated its own System V license. SCO Group has said it would sue Linux users and distributors.

SuSE Strikes Back

Now SuSE is fighting back, taking up the open-source banner against SCO Group with the argument that a Novell-SuSE merger has the potential to help users everywhere. It would create a stable standard that would make it easier to implement open-source applications, the company says.

"We're just beginning the planning stages of integration with Novell right now, so there's not a whole lot of detail," said SuSE vice president of corporate communications Joseph Eckert.

"But we do see the next arena as enabling the systems management -- enabling a greater access to those who use open-source applications by creating a standard to which all of that can be written," he told NewsFactor. "We believe that will enable an unlimited amount of flexibility in creating middleware solution stacks."

And all this can be accomplished through the buyout that SCO has gone to lengths to condemn, he said.

SuSE's Not Suing Anybody

"Here we have this world-class sales and channel infrastructure in Novell that we simply could have tried to grow organically over the next five to 10 years, but with Novell we have it instantly," he said. "We have a partner that feels same way about open source that we do, shares the same ideals, and already talks about service-oriented architecture, so we have this service organization behind us helping to build and manage the solution stacks for customers and partners."

As for SCO Group's allegations, Eckert pointed out that the Linux SCO uses is based on SuSE Linux, and that SCO and SuSE already have agreements in place about competing and partnering. He also sneered at the company's growing reputation for litigiousness.

"We're not planning to sue anybody, so I'm not seeing where the competition is," he said. "As far as I know, they're nothing more than a litigation company right now, not a software company."