UnixWare

UnixWare is a flavor of the Unix operating system. It was originally released by Univel, a joint-owned venture of AT&T s UNIX Systems Laboratories (USL) and Novell. In June 1993 Novell acquired USL and UNIX System V source code from AT&T and formed Novell Unix Systems Group.

For some time in the early 1990s UnixWare was one of the three pillars of Novell s long-term business strategy, as Ray Noorda put it, they were NetWare, UnixWare and AppWare . At the time their traditional cash cow, NetWare, was rapidly being displaced by Windows NT-based servers, and Novell was trying to diversify. At the same time Norda had an intense personal hatred towards Bill Gates, and was in the process of spending much of Novell s war chest purchasing a suite of products he could use to take on MS in the market, or through lawsuits.

Having failed to make any headway with the technically interesting DR-DOS, it appears Norda saw UnixWare as a way to make an end run around Window s dominance, providing Novell with a powerful operating system that could complete with NT (which was not yet well established), but with a much longer history and considerably more testing. There was an attempt to combine NetWare and UnixWare to create a single new system known as SuperNOS ( Network Operating System ), which would offer users the well-known NetWare networking services, while offering developers the well-known Unix development platform. Although Novell already offered a way for third parties to write code for NetWare, but it was an arduous process that UnixWare would dramatically improve.

UnixWare never really had a chance to prove itself in the marketplace. By the time it was starting to mature in late 1994, Noorda was in the process of being forced out of Novell. With his departure the new management decided to return to the cash cow, ignoring and then selling off all of the aquisitions Noorda made over the previous few years. This was, in retrospect, a terrible move; NetWare was by this time non-competitive and hopelessly outdated, and SuperNOS was perhaps the only obvious way for them to stay relevant. But, as one of the Noordisms , management saw it as just another useless product distracting them from the real market.

Novell sold UnixWare in 1995 to the Tarantella, Inc., which in turn sold its Unix-related businesses to Caldera Systems in 2001. Caldera changed its name to SCO Group in 2002, and this SCO Group is the current proprietor of UnixWare.The current version of UnixWare is 7.1.4 at the time of this writing.