Caldera OpenLinux

» see caldera.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

caldera openlinux's peak years overlap with my early linux years, but it sat on the wrong side of the cd rack from where i was. in 2000 i was a turkish high school student about to start engineering, running mandrake 7 off a magazine cover cd over an isdn line, and the linux i could read about in turkish hardware magazines was always red hat or mandrake, with suse coming up in any installer comparison piece. caldera openlinux was the one american magazines kept mentioning in product roundups, but the boxed copies never made it into the istanbul tech shops i passed through when relatives visited.

caldera inc was founded in 1994 in orem utah by ransom love and bryan sparks, with funding from ray noorda, the ex-ceo of novell who had just lost the netware market to microsoft. the company's original product was caldera network desktop, a 1995 attempt to repackage red hat with a friendlier installer and some novell directory services on top. that did not sell. in 1997 caldera bought german firm lst software's lst power linux distribution and rebranded it as caldera openlinux, this time aimed at small businesses and developers willing to pay for a clean desktop linux with proprietary tools layered in.

the famous feature was lizard. the linux installation wizard caldera shipped starting with openlinux 2.2 in november 1998 was the first widely-used graphical installer that let you partition the disk and choose packages while a tetris clone ran in the background. linux journal named openlinux 2.3 product of the year in 1999 partly on the strength of that installer. the bundled software was the other strong card. partition magic from powerquest sat next to wordperfect from corel in every box, and netware for linux from novell was the deal that mattered more to small business it. for around fifty dollars a box, you got an entire stack that ran on cheap pc hardware.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

caldera systems went public in march 2000 at the absolute crest of the dot com linux ipo wave, raising around seventy million dollars on a 1.1 billion dollar opening day valuation. the share price doubled at the open and was back below ipo by november. caldera spent some of the cash on the lineo embedded linux spinoff and the rest on buying the unix business from sco in august 2000 for a hundred million dollars, a deal that closed in may 2001. the company renamed itself caldera international, then darl mcbride took over as ceo in june 2002. the openlinux brand still existed at that point but the strategic direction was already shifting back to legacy sco unix on a linux base.

~ the day it became sco ~

in may 2002 caldera joined united linux, the suse-led consortium with turbolinux and conectiva as the other partners, aimed at standardizing a single business linux base across the second tier of distributions. openlinux 3.1.1 from january 2002 was the last release under the openlinux name on the caldera codebase. the next release was branded caldera openlinux powered by united linux, then caldera international renamed itself the sco group in august 2002 and the same product was rebranded a third time to sco linux powered by united linux. that release was the last one. on may 14 2003 the sco group announced it was suspending all linux sales while pursuing intellectual property claims that it eventually filed against ibm in march of the same year.

~ what got buried with it ~

the sco lawsuits against ibm plus the follow-on novell and linux vendor cases ran from 2003 to 2021 and lost in every venue they reached. the sco group filed for chapter 11 in september 2007 and converted to chapter 7 in august 2012. the openlinux codebase was abandoned long before that, the last lizard release was 2002 and the installer dna survived only as a footnote in the history of every later linux installer that followed the pattern caldera had popularized. the wordperfect for linux port died with the brand. nobody continued openlinux as a community fork because by 2003 nobody wanted the caldera name on a linux project.

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