Actually, Novell bought Unix from AT&T. I was a big fan of SCO, back when it was a software company. I worked quite a bit with SCO Xenix, and later, SCO Unix, though both seemed to be more based System III than System V. They were rock solid operating systems, though they weren't exactly "standard."
During Eric Schmidt's rein, Novell (which was also a rock solid NOS from version v2.0 -v6,) bought Unix from AT&T. While that seemed like a pretty good idea at the time - Netware was a fantastic file server, but a very mediocre application server. Unix filled a missing role. Then Novell decided to market Unix as a FILE SERVER, positioning it as competition to it's own flagship product.
Novell's marketing department was the worst. They couldn't sell space heaters to Eskimos! I was convinced that they were actually all on Microsoft's payroll. For goodness sake, there are still some very useful features of Novell's NDS from back in early 2000s that Active Directory still can't do!
Mark
Yes, and I can tell you one of them. The administrator could grant specific folder perms to a user several levels down, and the user's file explorer would show the user the folder all the way down but not the contents until the authorized folder was reached. (It was very slick, but a bit difficult to audit). What did Microsoft do about that? Their reps lied about it, saying that all the content was visible all the way down and the Active Directory was far more secure as a result. In fact, AD was a mess, and mostly remains that way, with different share and NTFS perms all the way down. Sorry, this is pretty geeky but I was managing both eDirectory and AD at the time.
The point is that people like me who administered both knew it was wrong but the MS guys simply wouldn't be talked out of it, at least in public. It was at that point that I knew MS marketing was in charge. And I'll still take up the sword for eDirectory, RIP.