Caldera (company)
| Industry | Software industry |
|---|---|
| Founded | October 1994 |
| Founder |
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| Defunct | |
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Caldera was a US-based software company founded in 1994 to develop Linux- and DOS-based operating system products.
Caldera, Inc. was a Canopy-funded software company founded in October 1994 and incorporated in January 1995 by former Novell employees Bryan Sparks, Ransom Love and others to develop the Caldera Network Desktop and later create a Linux distribution named OpenLinux. The company was originally based in Provo and later in Orem, Utah, USA.
Their first product was Caldera Network Desktop (CND), which was based on Red Hat Linux and Novell's Corsair Internet Desktop.
The later OpenLinux distribution was based on the German LST Power Linux distribution maintained by Stefan Probst's and Ralf Flaxa's company LST Software GmbH (with LST standing for Linux Support Team) in Erlangen, Germany.
Looking for a DOS operating system to bundle with their OpenLinux distribution, Caldera, backed up by The Canopy Group as their largest investor, acquired Novell DOS 7 and other Digital Research assets from Novell on 23 July 1996. The deal consisted of a direct payment of US$400,000 as well as percentual royalties for any revenues derived from DR-DOS to Novell. Caldera filed the Caldera v. Microsoft antitrust lawsuit the same day. This lawsuit related to Caldera's claims of monopolization, illegal tying, exclusive dealing, and tortious interference by Microsoft. An example was that certain beta versions of Windows 3.1 produced technically groundless "non-fatal" fake error messages when installing and running them on DR DOS 6.0 due to a check known as AARD code in order to create fear, uncertainty and doubt and destroy DR DOS' reputation. Another example was bundling and artificially tying MS-DOS 7 and Windows 4 into a single product (Windows 95) in order to eliminate competition. Caldera later demonstrated that it would have been beneficial for DOS and Windows users to have a choice between MS-DOS and DR-DOS featurewise, and that it was technically possible to run Windows 4 on DR-DOS 7 simply by faking some new, unnecessarily complex but functionally non-essential internal interfaces through WinGlue.
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