sunflash-Distributed to mailing list sun/NC/north-carolina sunflash-Send requests, problems to owner-sunflash@suntri.east.sun.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Florida SunFlash SunSoft Concludes Licensing Agreement with Novell SunFLASH Vol 63 #68 March 1994 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 63.68 SunSoft Concludes Licensing Agreement with Novell Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced that it has reached an agreement that eliminates all royalty obligations to Novell for UNIX-based licensing, and is now released from distribution and licensing restrictions for Solaris and its technology components included in a prior 1987 agreement. As part of the agreement, Sun's software subsidiary, SunSoft, announced that it will license Novell's NetWare networking software technologies, including NetWare client, NetWare for UNIX (server) and the IPX/SPX protocol. The entire agreement is valued at $82.5 million. (130 lines) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paves Way to Broadly License its Solaris Technology Licenses NetWare Network Client Components With this conclusion of the 1987 agreement, Sun now has the flexibility to distribute or modify all existing and future Sun-licensed products using UNIX code, as well as collaborate more freely with Novell on future technologies, such as the joint effort currently underway to unify the UNIX desktop and operating system specifications. "We believe there are major benefits for both Sun and Novell," said Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems Inc. "The software business has changed dramatically since our original agreement with Novell/USL, and it was time for the two companies to evolve our relationship from vendor-purchaser, to a strong partnership. We are currently collaborating on a number of projects, such as the co-development of a common desktop environment (CDE) and SPEC 1170 UNIX specifications. Removing the old AT&T/Sun negotiated restrictions will allow us to more easily work with Novell on future projects" "By gaining control of our own technology, we can immediately offer Solaris as the most cost-effective 32-bit rightsizing environment that outperforms any other software enviroment in the market today," said Edward Zander, president of SunSoft. "We have more flexibility to price our products competitively and this gives us the opportunity to gain significant incremental volume. This really benefits our hardware OEM partners, volume end users and anyone interested in our leading implementation of UNIX System V in source or binary code, as well as the technology components that comprise Solaris." Sun can now oversee development, licensing, pricing and distribution of its System V Release 4 (SVR4),and SVR3.2-based products. SVR4 is the foundation technology for the Solaris operating environment, and SVR3.2 is the base component of INTERACTIVE UNIX Operating System, a leading multi-user timesharing software environment. Solaris is the industry's best-selling 32-bit software environment. There are more than 1.5 million units installed and more than 8,600 32-bit UNIX applications available to users. Solaris runs today on the leading RISC (SPARC) and CISC (x86 and Pentium) platforms, and will be available for the PowerPC microprocessor in the next year. As the industry moves to client-server computing, the ability to seamlessly integrate a PC-LAN environment into a heterogeneous UNIX-based enterprise becomes imperative. SunSoft has licensed components of NetWare, the defacto PC-LAN standard. This includes NetWare client, which gives any Solaris system the ability to connect to a NetWare server; and the IPX/SPX protocol, which lets NetWare clients run applications from Solaris servers with NetWare for UNIX without any modification to the client software. Sun and Novell have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding to license NetWare for UNIX, which enables any Solaris departmental or enterprise server to provide file, database and print services to any NetWare client. With the addition of NetWare support together with SunSoft's leading implementation of TCP/IP for MS-Windows clients (PC-NFS), users can benefit from having the leading local area networks for the PC environments integrated with the enterprise network capabilities of Solaris. In addition, Solaris provides a full application environment with multitasking, multiprocessing and wide area network and systems administration capabilities. Sun Microsystems, Inc., is an integrated portfolio of businesses that supply distributed computing technologies, products and services. Its innovative open client-server computing solutions include networked workstations and multiprocessing servers, operating system software, silicon designs and other value-added technologies. Founded in 1982, Sun is a Fortune 150 company headquartered in Mountain View, California. # # # (c) 1994 Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun, the Sun logo, PC-NFS, Solaris and Sun Microsystems are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. All SPARC trademarks, including the SCD Compliant logo, are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based on an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark of UNIX Systems Laboratories, a wholly owned subsidiary of Novell, Inc. Interactive is a trademark of Eastman-Kodak Company. Pentium is a trademark of Intel Corporation. PowerPC is a trademark of International Business Machines. NetWare is a registered trademark of Novell, Inc. MS-Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. All other product or service names mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners. Key points for Novell/USL Agreement ********************************************************************** For information about SunFlash send mail to info-sunflash@Sun.COM. Subscription requests should be sent to sunflash-request@Sun.COM. Archives are on draco.nova.edu, ftp.uu.net, sunsite.unc.edu, src.doc.ic.ac.uk and ftp.adelaide.edu.au For last month's digest, send email to flashadm@sun.com with a Subject line of 62.00 For Gopher and WAIS access: sunsite.unc.edu. (Login as 'gopher' for a simple gopher client, 'swais' for a simple WAIS client (over 500 databases). All prices, availability, and other statements relating to Sun or third party products are valid in the U.S. only. 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