Novell takes another legal swipe at Microsoft

Fresh from winning $536m from Microsoft last week, Novell has announced the filing of another lawsuit against the Redmond company.

Last week's settlement covered Novell NetWare, but the new suit concerns the WordPerfect productivity package which Novell owned from June 1994 to March 1996.

Novell is alleging that Microsoft withheld technical data about Windows that could be used to develop WordPerfect, and used its monopoly power to force hardware vendors to stop bundling the software.

"While this lawsuit is unrelated to Novell's current business, the claims are important and hold considerable value for Novell," said Joseph LaSala, Novell's senior vice president and general counsel, in a statement.

"We intend to pursue aggressively a goal of recovering fair value for the harm caused to Novell's business by Microsoft's anti-competitive actions."

WordPerfect, originally developed by Utah-based Satellite Software, was the dominant word processing package in the early 1990s with over half the total market. But by 1996 it had been eclipsed by Microsoft's Word.

Novell sold WordPerfect in 1996 to Corel for about $170m, but its value had been estimated at about $1bn in 1994.

The latest legal case against Microsoft stems from evidence revealed in the antitrust case brought by the US Department of Justice, which was settled last year. A similar EU investigation is still under way.