Caldera International
defunct American software company
Caldera International, Inc., earlier Caldera Systems, was an American software company that existed from 1998 to 2002 and developed and sold Linux- and Unix-based operating system products.
Caldera Systems was created in August 1998 as a spinoff of Caldera, Inc., with Ransom Love as its CEO. It focused on selling Caldera OpenLinux, a high-end Linux distribution aimed at business customers that included features it developed, such as an easy-to-use, graphical installer and graphical and web-based system administration tools, as well as features from bundled proprietary software. Caldera Systems was also active in the Java language and software platform on Linux community.
In March 2000, Caldera Systems staged a successful IPO of its stock, although the stock price did not reach the stratospheric heights of its chief competitor Red Hat and some other companies during the "Linux mania" of 1999.
In August 2000, Caldera Systems announced the purchase of Unix technology and services from the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). The much larger, merged company changed its name to Caldera International when the deal closed in May 2001.
In the end none of these efforts succeeded in the marketplace, and Caldera Systems/International lost large amounts of money in all four years of its existence. Under severe financial pressure, in June 2002 Love was replaced as CEO by Darl McBride, who soon adopted the corporate name The SCO Group and took that entity in a completely different business direction.
Caldera Systems
Background and formation
Caldera, Inc., based in Utah, was founded in 1994 by Bryan Wayne Sparks and Ransom H. Love, receiving start-up funding from Ray Noorda's Canopy Group. Its main product was Caldera Network Desktop (CND), a Linux distribution mainly targeted at business customers and containing some proprietary additions.
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This entry incorporates text from “Caldera International” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.