Hardardt said SCO's legal actions have created a "cloud" over some partners and customers who have been "sitting on the sidelines."
Joseph LaSala, Jr., senior vice president and general counsel of Novell, said: "To the extent that any party out there attempts to thwart the enterprise adoption of Linux on the basis of copyrights, Novell is saying to those end users: become a customer of Novell and you will be afforded an added measure of protection to the extent that SCO or someone else challenges the SUSE Linux distribution."
Novell's move follows actions by several other major Linux vendors to provide protection for customers using the operating system. The SCO Group has claimed that its intellectual property ended up in Linux and has charged IBM with contract violations in that regard.
Hewlett-Packard has also offered its own, limited indemnification for Linux users, which does not include software that has been altered. Critics said such provisos make indemnification almost meaningless because the benefit of open-source software like Linux is the ease with which it can be adapted and customized.
And earlier this week, the Open Source Development Labs, IBM and Intel announced they would create a multimillion-dollar defense fund for any customer sued by SCO. (See story.) That fund would cover the legal costs of any customer sued by SCO for copyright infringement.
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