NetWare is a network operating system and the set of network protocols it uses to talk to client machines on the network. The NetWare operating system is a proprietary system using cooperative multitasking to run various services on a PC, and the network protocols are based on the archetypical Xerox XNS stack. NetWare was one of a series of XNS-based systems, which also included Banyan VINES and Ungerman-Bass Net/One. Unlike these products, and XNS itself, NetWare established a strong presense in the market in the early 1990s, and managed to barely survive the onslaught of Microsoft's Windows NT which killed off the other players.
The latest release is version 6.5. Novell has announced an integration of Netware applications over a Linux kernel from its next release (version 7.0) Also, consequent to Novell's acquisitions of Ximian and SuSE, a German Linux distributor, it is widely observed that Novell may be weaning away from Netware and shift its focus towards porting applications over Linux.
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