Caldera
More info
- Creator
- Ransom Love, Bryan Sparks
- Released
- 1994
- Type
- Linux company
One of the first companies to sell Linux to business, and the one that eventually turned into Linux's worst enemy.
Caldera was founded in Utah in 1994 with money from Ray Noorda, the former head of Novell and a man with a long-standing grudge against Microsoft. Its OpenLinux distribution went after the enterprise years before Red Hat and SUSE owned that market. In 1996 Caldera bought DR-DOS from Novell and sued Microsoft for squeezing it out with Windows 95. The 2000 settlement was later reported at around $280 million.
In 2001 Caldera bought the server business of the Santa Cruz Operation, and in 2002 it renamed itself SCO Group. The Linux business was wound down, and litigation took over as the business model.