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Defunct American software company

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. Caldera Systems, whose actual incorporation date had been August 21, 1998, took over the Linux business, including development, training, services, and support, while Caldera Thin Clients (which changed its name to Lineo the following year) took over the DOS and embedded business. The shell company Caldera, Inc., remained responsible for the lawsuit only. Drew Spencer joined in 1999 and became the company's Chief Technology Officer. Towards this end they created a professional certification program for Linux as well as for the KDE desktop that the Caldera Systems distribution used. In doing so they worked with the Linux Professional Institute in developing class materials and created a series of Authorized Linux Education Centers around the globe that would train successful students towards doing well in Linux Professional Institute Certification Programs. Beginning courses trained on several difficult Linux distributions as well as Caldera OpenLinux, while more advanced courses focused on OpenLinux only Red Hat also tended to get the most media attention. Caldera Systems focused on a high end Linux product and its Linux distribution became rich with features with bundled proprietary software. For instance, the company offered NetWare for Linux, which included a full blown NetWare implementation from Novell. They licensed Sun Microsystems's Wabi to allow people to run Windows applications under Linux. Additionally, they shipped with Linux versions of WordPerfect from Corel as well as productivity applications from Applixware. Caldera OpenLinux was also available on a retail basis, in the form of a CD ROM for installing Linux on an IBM PC compatible machine that sold for
OpenLinux 2.2, released in April 1999, was seen as significantly improved from the previous year's 1.3 release, especially in terms of it having a fully graphical and easy to use installation feature. Ease of installation was an important criteria in selecting a Linux distribution, Several years later it was still receiving praise from reviewers. Following that, Caldera Systems sponsored the development of browser based Unix system administration via the webmin project between 1999 and 2001. It became the first Linux distribution to include Webmin as the standard tool for system administration. Caldera Systems was a leader in the adoption of the Java language and software platform on Linux. In 2000, Caldera Systems was one of the companies elected to the inaugural JCP Executive Committee for Java SE/EE, which guided the evolution of Java language and software platform through the Java Community Process. Caldera Systems' role on the Executive Committee included representing the Linux and open source communities. Work to improve just in time compilation under the Sun "Classic JVM" for SCO Unix platforms that begun under SCO was completed with Caldera International. and participating in the JSR 48 WBEM Services Specification. However, the industry saw promise in Linux as a solution for businesses, and in the latter half of 1999 a "Linux hysteria" had erupted in the stock market, with first Red Hat in August 1999 and then Cobalt Networks and VA Linux in November and December 1999 having experienced huge jumps in value during their first day each of trading. A settlement to the Caldera v. Microsoft suit over DR DOS was announced, with Microsoft paying former parent company Caldera, Inc. an amount estimated at $275 million
Caldera Systems received a $30 million private equity investment from a group of companies that included Sun Microsystems, Novell, Citrix, Santa Cruz Operation, Chicago Venture Partners, and Egan Managed Capital, with the goal to "fund operations and accelerate the growth and acceptance of Linux." but that Caldera Systems could get an intangible benefit from a name association with a company that had bested an industry giant. Love also said that the timing between the funding round, work for which had begun six months earlier, and the IPO announcement was "unfortunate, and completely coincidental". On the first day of trading, March 21, 2000, Caldera Systems' shares doubled in value, going from an initial price of $14 to close at $29 7/16, with heavy trading been seen and an intra day high of $33. (The agreement was phrased in terms of Caldera Holding, Inc., a typical Newco in such transactions.) The annual SCO Forum conference of developers and resellers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, held later that month, had its name shortened to just "Forum". As Forbes magazine stated, "Questions remain about execution, but the deal is at least a temporary life preserver for SCO, whose flagship UnixWare server software was in danger of eventually becoming irrelevant in the face of Linux." using the argument that resellers could find larger margins with free software than by selling Microsoft's Windows NT. But it had been a difficult sell against SCO; even when Linux outperformed SCO Unix, the idea of switching vendors and support organizations made resellers reluctant to make the move. There were hurdles to be overcome, including a fair amount of enmity for SCO within the Linux community. The SCO acquisition was originally scheduled to close in October 2000, However, the two companies' support organizations did get combined during this time. Analysts were skeptical that these multiple operating systems could be managed without considerable difficulties being encountered.

The merger was originally being done under the name of the holding company Caldera, Inc.,
Then on March 26, 2001, during the CeBIT conference in Germany, Caldera Systems announced that it would be changing its name to Caldera International once the SCO acquisition was complete. By this point, the length and difficulty of the acquisition process had alienated some longtime SCO customers and partners. The acquisition closed on May 7, 2001, and the new Caldera International name became effective. The merged company had major offices in not just Utah, but also Santa Cruz, California, Murray Hill, New Jersey, and Watford, England, as well as smaller facilities in 16 additional countries. which had been one of two SCO subsidiaries in that country. Overall, SCO had an infrastructure presence of some kind in 80 countries, whereas Caldera Systems had always been largely domestic, thus in part the rationale for the name change. In light of that, the company began the Caldera Developer Network, which was intended to give developers of all kinds "early access to UNIX and Linux technologies, allowing them to develop on UNIX, on Linux or on a combined UNIX and Linux platform." While it may have been done to make the branding more consistent with OpenLinux and Open Server, it confused people as well as build and installation scripts that tested for system name. In terms of the question of making some of UnixWare open source, in August 2001 Caldera International did announce that it was placing the code for the regular expression parser and the grep and awk commands, as well for the AIM Multiuser Benchmark, under the GNU General Public License. But overall, Caldera International found itself in a classic business problem where the interests of the existing business conflicted with their growth model. SCO Unix was mature and sold itself (mainly to repeat customers and replicated sites). And even those that were supportive of Linux, did not necessarily see a strong value add for Caldera International products and could often sell Red Hat Enterprise Linux instead. Intended for service providers and corporate accounts, it was based around OpenLDAP and Novell eDirectory. It featured some sophisticated functionality, but its initial user interface was limited in some ways and the product was costly. The service also delivered alerts to customers regarding the necessity for upgrades. Caldera Systems had earlier begun work on a Linux equivalent to the Microsoft Exchange Server that was aimed at the small to medium business market. It offered shared calendaring and scheduling options, SSL support for e mail, simple configuration, and integration with Microsoft Outlook. However, there were already a number of mail servers available for Linux and none of them had taken off in the business market. Caldera Systems, and then Caldera International, had substantial experience with Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM), and its OpenWBEM implementation won the Best Open Source Project Award at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in February 2002. That, combined with experience in the Kerberos authentication protocol and the difficulties of Windows–Unix integration, The product of this work was the Volution Authentication Server, which allowed the management of Unix and Linux authentication via Active Directory.

When Caldera OpenLinux 3.1 Workstation was released in June 2001, it was with the requirement for per seat licensing. This was part of what continued to bring criticism of Caldera in the some quarters of the open source and free software communities; Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman subsequently said of Ransom Love, "He's only a parasite", to which Love took umbrage, responding, "Did Richard Stallman ever invest £50m in Linux? We did. I have been involved in the Linux community since my time at Novell in 1994. I am not a greedy capitalist. I am only a businessman. You can't call our business model parasitic. We add value to Linux, so it can become successful. I know that the open source movement has no clue about marketing, they underestimate it." United Linux was an attempt by a consortium of Linux companies to create a common base distribution for enterprise use and minimize duplication of engineering effort. The UnitedLinux distribution would be based mostly SuSE Enterprise Linux rather than Caldera OpenLinux. The Caldera product name was changed to "Caldera OpenLinux powered by United Linux", which as one Network World writer observed, was "certainly never going to become a catchphrase." UnitedLinux did attract some major hardware vendors in support, such as Hewlett Packard, Intel, and AMD, with the goal of creating a uniform Linux distribution by the end of 2002. Overall, the fortunes of Caldera International had been steadily declining, the SCO–Caldera combined total revenue having decreased from $170 million in 1999 to $70 million in 2001. In the following quarter they took a large write down of the assets acquired from SCO, as they could no longer be accounted for as having the value they were originally thought to possess. For the fiscal year ending on October 31, 2001, Caldera International reported a loss of $131.4 million based on revenues of $40.4 million (the loss included a total amount of write down and other non cash and restructuring charges of $98.6 million). The Linux side of Caldera International was bleeding funds; it was spending $4 for each $1 it received in revenue. An example of Linux Kernel Personality being used was Shoppers Drug Mart, which used it to run a SilverStream Software application server on UnixWare. In part Caldera International's problems were due to the economic environment surrounding the collapse of the dot com bubble; investors were very reluctant to put additional monies into unprofitable start up companies. The additional effects of the early 2000s recession were especially difficult for high tech companies, with information technology spending slowing to a near halt. Also in March 2002, Caldera International moved its headquarters from Orem to Lindon, Utah. A localized layoff hit the Santa Cruz office in April 2002. An especially broad, 15 percent layoff in May 2002 affected all areas of the company, with 73 people being let go and around 400 employees remaining. Offices in Chelmsford, Massachusetts and Erlangen, Germany were closed,

Despite having earlier done the reverse stock split, as well as a stock buyback, in late June 2002 Caldera International received another delisting notice from NASDAQ.

On June 27, 2002, Caldera International had a change in management, with Darl McBride, formerly an executive with Novell, FranklinCovey, and several start ups, taking over as CEO from Ransom Love. At the same time, Caldera International said it would buy back its stock owned by Tarantella, Inc. and MTI Technology, thereby relieving itself of the obligation to pay a percentage of OpenServer revenue past a certain point to Tarantella. (The final legal aspects of the name change did not become complete until May 2003. The Volution Messaging Server product was retained and renamed SCOoffice Server, but the other Volution products were split off under the names Volution Technologies, Center 7, and finally Vintela. Within a few months after that, SCO had begun issuing proclamations and lawsuits based upon its belief that its Unix intellectual property had been incorporated into Linux in an unlawful and uncompensated manner, and had stopped selling its own Linux product. The SCO–Linux disputes were fully underway, and SCO would soon become, as Businessweek headlined, "The Most Hated Company In Tech". Interviewed later in 2003, Ransom Love – by then no longer in the Linux business either – said that SCO might have a legitimate argument regarding some specific contractual issues, but that lawsuits were rarely helpful and that "Fundamentally, I would not have pursued SCO's path."

Caldera played an important role in Linux history by establishing what would be necessary to create a mainstream, business oriented system, with stability and support, out of the Linux kernel. Along with Red Hat and SuSE, it was the most important of the commercial Linux distributions. And as Glyn Moody wrote in Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Caldera Systems' announcement in 2000 that it was buying SCO Unix – and with it code that dated back through Unix System Laboratories and AT&T before that – was the final marker for the ascendency of Linux over the Unix old guard: "The hackers had triumphed over the establishment." But from a business perspective, the Caldera Systems acquisition of SCO Unix has been treated less kindly in retrospect. In 2016, ZDNet ranked it ninth on its list of the worst technology mergers and acquisitions of all time. In any case, the one true success story to come out of business oriented Linux distributions was Red Hat, who at the time maintained they were competing against Microsoft, not Caldera Systems or the other distributions, and which set several marks for revenue for an open source oriented business before being acquired by IBM in 2018 for $34 billion. Perhaps the most successful technology venture to come out of Caldera International was the Volution Authentication Server, which under the Vintela name achieved considerable success. and the Vintela software became a core part of that company's One Identity product. As Dave Wilson, CEO of Vintela, later said, "Caldera Systems played a major role in establishing Linux as a serious technology in our industry, and the people who worked for Caldera Systems are very proud of their achievements. Many of those people continue to drive innovation [at a variety of other companies]."