Caldera OpenLinux
Caldera OpenLinux is a defunct Linux distribution that was originally introduced by Caldera in 1997 based on the German LST Power Linux distribution, and then taken over and further developed by Caldera Systems since 1998. A successor to the Caldera Network Desktop put together by Caldera since 1995, OpenLinux was an early "business-oriented distribution" and foreshadowed the direction of developments that came to most other distributions and the Linux community generally.
Novell Corsair
Corsair, a user interface for NetWare, was a project run by Novell corporation's Advanced Technology Group between 1993 and 1995. Novell wanted a desktop environment with internet connectivity and conducted research on how to better and more easily integrate and manage network access for users. Windows' own support for connecting to Novell networks would not be improved until later releases and the Internet was dominated by Unix-based operating systems. Relative to their needs, Novell deemed the Unixes of the day were too hardware intensive, too large, and charged too much in license fees.This group became convinced that Linux offered the best possible answer for the OS component. There were many other components as well, and these were of particular interest:
- Willows, a Microsoft Windows-compatible API for Unix systems to allow recompilation of Windows programs for Linux.
- Wine, a compatibility layer for running Windows and DOS software
- Ferret, a meeting browser
- WordPerfect, a then cross-platform word processing application bought by Novell in June 1994
Frankenberg's initiative was to refocus the company on networking and networking services. In terms of Corsair, that meant shedding most of the pieces. The Advanced Technology Group was disbanded, which shut down Willows and the OS project. Negotiations started which would eventually lead to WordPerfect being sold off to Corel in January 1996. Ferret was in line with the new direction and this component was kept within Novell.
Through his Noorda Family Trust, Ray Noorda had founded a venture capital investment group called the Canopy Group two years earlier in 1992. He thought there was substantial promise in both the OS project and the Willows project. He created two companies, to continue the work started at Novell. The "API company" was called Willows Software, Inc. and the "OS company" became Caldera, Inc..
Noorda's early vision for Caldera was to create an IPX-based version of Linux which would license the key components, and resell this technology back to Novell to continue the Internet Desktop. In effect, in 1994 Caldera started life as kind of an outsourcing project for Novell, based on a technology demo named Exposé. Caldera started with ten employees and most were from Novell: Bryan Wayne Sparks, founder/president ; Bryce J. Burns, chief operations officer ; Ransom H. Love, VP marketing ; Greg Page, VP engineering ; and Craig Bradley, VP Sales.
Caldera Network Desktop
At this point in 1995 Ransom Love and Ray Noorda took note of the technologies that Caldera put together, specifically:- Caldera built on the Linux kernel which ran on x86, PowerPC and Alpha architectures. Caldera Network Desktop was based on Red Hat Commercial Linux.
- Its wide area networking was far more advanced than the Microsoft networked OSes at the time, due to its being Unix-like.
- Caldera included a version of Novell's IPX network protocol and a client for NetWare.
- The Willows Application Programming Interface for Windows code written for Caldera's operating system would run on Unix, Microsoft Windows, and Apple Macintosh, as well as Caldera's system itself.
- Caldera also incorporated LISA, which had been developed by the German Linux Support Team for their own Linux distribution.
Caldera also supported Alan Cox in his work on SMP. If Linux displaced Unix on the Intel x86 platform, then Sun Microsystems wouldn't have a low-end Unix path. This point becomes more interesting in light of SCO's litigation eight years later against IBM in 2003. That is, IBM was not the company involved in the SMP work, and moreover, the company most directly involved is the company that later became the SCO Group, essentially SCO suing IBM for work it itself did.
In 1995, when XFree86 was still very hard to configure and unreliable on most chipsets, Caldera had shipped with MetroLink's Motif and XI Graphic's Accelerated-X.
Known releases:
- Caldera Network Desktop 1.0 Preview I
- Caldera Network Desktop 1.0 Preview II with Linux kernel 1.2.13
- Caldera Network Desktop 1.0
- Caldera Network Desktop Bundle
Caldera OpenLinux
During 1996, Caldera continued to be a valuable player, for example, on 23 May 1996, at the Linux Kongress in Berlin, Germany, Caldera announced its plans to obtain POSIX and FIPS certifications and the X/Open brand for UNIX 95 and XPG4 BASE 95 for the Linux operating system kernel and "Open Linux".In contrast to CND OpenLinux was based on LST Power Linux, a Slackware-derived distribution that had been maintained by Linux Support Team since 1993 and the first to come with a Linux 2.0 kernel. In 1996 Linux Support Team grew into Stefan Probst's and Ralf Flaxa's company LST Software GmbH in Erlangen, Germany. The OpenLinux development led them to become Caldera's German development center Caldera Deutschland GmbH since May 1997.
On 23 July 1996, Caldera purchased Novell DOS and the remaining Digital Research assets from Novell in order to bundle a DOS with their version of Linux, which led to creating the OpenDOS distribution to help port DOS applications.
Caldera supported the Linux-port of StarOffice 3.1 with ca. 800.000 DM in order to offer the product with their forthcoming OpenLinux distribution in 1997.
By 1997, when the OpenLinux distribution was first released, Caldera had taken on the form that it would be most remembered for. Caldera had switched over to the high end Linux product. The "business" Linux distribution became more rich with features with bundled proprietary software. However, it became less community oriented and was released less frequently than other Linuxes did. Other differences included automated configuration for administration tools, paid technical support staff, built-in consistent default GUI, and a range of supported applications.
Over the next five years, Caldera Systems offered additional commercial extensions to Linux. They licensed Sun's Wabi to allow people to run Windows applications under Linux. Additionally, they shipped with Linux versions of WordPerfect and CorelDRAW. Since many of their customers used a dual boot setup and FIPS was unreliable, they shipped with PowerQuest's PartitionMagic to allow their customers to non-destructively repartition their hard disks.
In partnership with IBM they produced the first Linux distribution which was DB2 compatible. With the Oracle Corporation they became the target platform for the Linux port of the Oracle database.
Other ventures included starting the Blackdown Java project, and creating professional certification.
They also formed strong partnerships with SCO's value-added reseller market and started laying the groundwork for OEM sales of Unix-based vertical applications.
Caldera Systems offered three versions of OpenLinux:
- OpenLinux Lite was a freely downloadable version.
- OpenLinux Base was a USD 99 version with a few extensions.
- OpenLinux Standard was USD 299 and was their fully featured product.
Caldera Systems created a full featured GUI system administration tool called Caldera Open Administration System. The tool was a unified, easy to use administration tool with a modular design. With its scalability and broad scope abilities, it featured:
- Portability
- Open development model
- Flexible module licensing
- Multiple user interfaces
- Scripting interface for rapid prototyping
- Backward compatibility
The desktop company became Caldera International under the direction of Ransom Love.
The focus for the desktop company became mainly marketing and business relationships. There were several reasons for this. The first was that Caldera had won a $280 million lawsuit against Microsoft for DR-DOS and was flush with cash. Secondly, while the Caldera distribution was good, its primary advantages were the use of technologies not owned by Caldera and thus if Caldera were successful its success could be imitated, by Red Hat, SUSE, TurboLinux, etc. Third, for years Caldera had been competing directly with SCO Unix, but by 1997 Linux outperformed SCO in almost every respect. Making the choice to switch from SCO to Caldera was not a "no-brainer" for companies because that also meant a switch of vendors and support organizations. Caldera's SCO acquisition was aimed at eliminating this problem. That is Caldera International's corporate direction became to combine SCO's distribution, marketing and VAR arm with LAMP, and use Project Monterey to develop a 64-bit strategy. What SCO offered was:
- A strong list of business clients.
- Higher compatibility between SCO and Linux than any other Unix/Linux combination, mainly as a result of Caldera's long standing SCO focus that created products like ABI and thus resulted in ports of SCO code to Linux
- A good back-office and database solution while Linux specialized in networking and client desktop, a very appealing combination in challenging Sun and Microsoft
- A global infrastructure, Caldera was domestic
- Thousands of business applications targeted to vertical markets
- Some of the 3rd party components needed to get HP-UX, AIX, Solaris 3rd party Java applications ported to Linux
Known releases :
- Caldera OpenLinux Lite/Base/Standard 1.0 with Linux kernel 2.0.25
- Caldera OpenLinux Lite/Base/Standard 1.1
- Caldera OpenLinux Lite/Base/Standard 1.2
- Caldera Systems OpenLinux Lite/Base 1.3 with Linux kernel 2.0.35
- Caldera Systems OpenLinux 1.4
- Caldera Systems OpenLinux 2.2 with Linux kernel 2.2.xx
- Caldera Systems OpenLinux eDesktop/eServer 2.3 with Linux kernel 2.2.10
- Caldera Systems OpenLinux eServer 2.3.1
- Caldera Systems OpenLinux eDesktop/eBuilder 2.4
- Caldera Systems OpenLinux eBuilder 3.0
- Caldera International OpenLinux Workstation/Server 3.1 with Linux kernel 2.4.2
- Caldera International OpenLinux Workstation/Server 3.1.1 with Linux kernel 2.4.xx
- Caldera NetWare for Linux 1.0
United Linux
The most logical solution was to establish Caldera Systems as the premier Linux brand. Without the threat from Red Hat, transitioning resellers from SCO to Caldera Systems would be much easier. With this in mind Ransom Love formed an alliance of large business oriented Linux distributions which utilized the KDE desktop, called United Linux. The alliance comprised Caldera International, SUSE Linux, Turbolinux, and Conectiva. Filings from Novell in the SCO Group SCO v. Novell lawsuit showed that this was more than simply a marketing gimmick, and was a real alliance.
Business responded favorably to the movement as IBM and AMD quickly formed partnerships. The Linux Professional Institute adopted United Linux as their standard distribution for training. For the first time there was a Linux distribution with:
- Global scope
- Global support at the VAR, OEM and distribution level
- A full training organization
- Some governmental buy-in
- Support from major corporations
- Enterprise applications like Oracle supported out of the box
- An actual production GUI that ran well on a variety of hardware
United Linux was rejected by the broader Linux community; the use of per-seat licensing was their most highly controversial decision. More importantly, by the time United Linux was released, Darl McBride had become CEO of Caldera International and the focus had shifted away from Linux.
Caldera International at this point released a Caldera "Linux distribution" with the OpenUNIX 8 kernel instead of the Linux kernel. Unix has TLI and STREAMS support, which made writing drivers easier. Caldera International proved this by replacing the kernel and yet not having to change much else on a full featured desktop and server "Linux".
Copyright infringement allegations
In 2002, the Caldera International board of directors, including Ralph Yarro, named Darl McBride, formerly with Franklin-Covey, as CEO. Almost immediately he saw the value of Caldera International as being primarily the value of SCO. The company was renamed The SCO Group. Ransom Love was reassigned to work exclusively on United Linux. After he completed this, he left the company to join Progeny Linux Systems which was aiming to create a professional Debian. He remained there in the capacity of a board member and advisor until 30 April 2007 when Progeny ceased operations.McBride began to focus on SCO's copyrights. One of McBride's first acts as CEO was to collect $600,000 in back licensing fees that were owed to Caldera International. He cleaned up various Linux-related licensing issues allowing for a new round of financing. Soon thereafter he made strong accusations that Linux had infringed copyrights SCO held on Unix; they claimed to have purchased these copyrights from Novell. Novell denied selling them the Unix copyright, prompting them to sue for slander of title. SCO also initiated lawsuits against IBM and AutoZone, alleging copyright infringements through the use or distribution of Linux; none of these lawsuits have been resolved. SCO has created a division, SCOsource, that owns and licenses their intellectual property; a desktop license is $699.