Caldera Open Linux - United Linux

United Linux

Caldera quickly found itself in a classic business problem where the interests of the existing business conflicted with their growth model. SCO was a much larger company than Caldera International had been (the DR-DOS settlement had been what made the buyout possible), and in fact of the $71 million of revenue 90% was from the SCO side of the business. Moreover, Caldera costs $4 in marketing to generate a $1 in sales, SCO was mature and sold itself (mainly to repeat customers). The VAR relationship was even more problematic. Caldera had always sold the "Linux is SCO but better" model and had done everything possible to make the transition from SCO to Caldera relatively seamless. Each of the 14,000 SCO resellers made much more from each SCO sale than from sales of Caldera so they were not anxious to move existing customers from SCO to Linux; and even those that were supportive of Linux saw no strong value add for Caldera and often sold Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Caldera had two businesses in direct competition one which was a shrinking but still profitable Unix business, the other a rapidly growing business that was still hemorrhaging money.

The most logical solution was to establish Caldera as the premier Linux brand. Without the threat from Red Hat, transitioning resellers from SCO to Caldera would be much easier. With this in mind Ransom Love formed an alliance of large business oriented Linux distributions which utilized the KDE desktop, called United Linux. The alliance comprised Caldera, SUSE Linux, Turbolinux, and Conectiva. Filings from Novell in the SCO Group SCO v. Novell lawsuit showed that this was more than simply a marketing gimmick, and was a real alliance.

Business responded favorably to the movement as IBM and AMD quickly formed partnerships. The Linux Professional Institute adopted United Linux as their standard distribution for training. For the first time there was a Linux distribution with:

• Global scope
• Global support at the VAR, OEM and distribution level
• A full training organization
• Some governmental buy-in
• Support from major corporations
• Enterprise applications like Oracle supported out of the box
• An actual production GUI that ran well on a variety of hardware

SUSE Linux had the engineering as it had continued to maintain a large technical staff, Caldera had the global support organization and Turbo Linux and Conectiva brought with growth potential into less flooded markets. This merger was so successful that Love and Sparks could claim vindication that year when Novell reversed the Frankenberg decision and brought United Linux engineering talent back into the fold with the acquisition of SUSE.

United Linux was rejected by the broader Linux community; the use of per seat licensing was their most highly controversial decision. More importantly by the time United Linux was released Caldera was already dead. Darl McBride had become CEO of Caldera International and the focus had shifted away from Linux.

As an incidental Caldera at this point released a Caldera "Linux distribution" with the OpenUNIX 8 kernel instead of the Linux kernel. Unix has TLI and STREAMS support which makes writing drivers easier. Caldera proved this by replacing the kernel and yet not having to change much else on a full featured desktop and server "Linux."