Caldera (company)
company
Caldera, Inc. was a Canopy-funded software company founded in October 1994 and incorporated on 25 January 1995 by former Novell employees Bryan Wayne Sparks, Ransom H. Love and others to develop the Caldera Network Desktop (CND) and later create a Linux distribution named OpenLinux (COL). The company was originally based in Provo and later in Orem, Utah, USA.
History
Their first product in 1995 was Caldera Network Desktop, which was based on Red Hat Linux and Novell's Corsair Internet Desktop. It also included LISA (Linux Installation and System Administration), which had been developed by the German Linux Support Team (LST) for their own Linux distribution.
The newer OpenLinux distribution was based on LST Power Linux, a Slackware-derived distribution that had been maintained by LST since 1993 and the first to come with a Linux 2.0 kernel.
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$400000 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.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5019031. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1995, 1993 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “Caldera (company)” 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.