SCO Group - History - Caldera Systems, Caldera Holdings, Caldera International

Caldera Systems, Caldera Holdings, Caldera International

See also: Caldera, Inc., its subsidiaries, and spin-offs

Caldera, Inc. based in Utah, was founded in 1994 by Bryan Sparks and Ransom Love, receiving start-up funding from Ray Noorda's Canopy Group. Its main product was Caldera Network Desktop, a Linux distribution mainly targeted at business customers and containing some proprietary additions. Caldera, Inc. later purchased The Linux Support Team Software GmbH and its LST Linux distribution. LST was made the basis of their following product Caldera OpenLinux.

Caldera, Inc. inherited a lawsuit against Microsoft when it purchased DR-DOS from Novell in 1996. This lawsuit related to Caldera's claims of monopolization, illegal tying, exclusive dealing, and tortious interference by Microsoft.

In August 1998, the original Caldera, Inc. company split into two daughter companies named Caldera Systems, Inc. and Caldera Thin Clients, Inc. Caldera Systems took over the Linux business, while Caldera Thin Clients took over the DOS and embedded business. The shell company Caldera, Inc., remained responsible for the law suit only.

Microsoft reached a settlement in January 2000 with Caldera, Inc., after which Caldera, Inc. stopped its operation. The payments involved in this settlement were later revealed inadvertently during the Novell v. Microsoft antitrust lawsuit as documented on Groklaw.

Later in 2000, Caldera Systems acquired several UNIX properties from the Santa Cruz Operation, including OpenServer and UnixWare, proprietary operating systems for PCs that would be expected to compete directly with Linux.

Caldera Systems reincorporated in Delaware on 2 March 2000 and completed an IPO of its common stock. By way of a temporary Caldera Holdings, Inc., the company reorganized in August 2000 and became Caldera International, Inc. (CII) in March 2001.

In 2002, Caldera International joined with SuSE Linux (now SUSE), Turbolinux and Conectiva to form United Linux in an attempt to standardize Linux distributions.

Later that year, CEO Ransom Love left the company and was replaced by Darl McBride, and the company changed its name to The SCO Group in August 2002.