Talk:Caldera (company)

Contested deletion

This article should not be speedy deleted as being recently created, having no relevant page history and duplicating an existing English Wikipedia topic, because:

I created this page in order to help stop the widespread confusion and mixup of the various Caldera companies and thereby hopefully help to stop the further spreading of false information within WP and all over the net (since everyone relies on WP without verifying the facts). There have been five companies firming under the "Caldera" label: Caldera, Inc. (the mother company from 1994-2000), Caldera UK, Ltd. (1996-1999), Caldera Thin Clients, Inc. (1998-1999), Caldera Systems, Inc. (1998-2001), and Caldera International, Inc. (2001-2002). Only one or two of them (Caldera International definitely and perhaps Caldera Systems as well) have a direct relationship to SCO. However, people are not aware of this and you find uncountable links and references to Caldera Systems (and thereby SCO) even in DOS-related articles, although Caldera Systems never had anything at all to do with the DR-DOS-based business or the Caldera vs. Microsoft law suit, and vice-versa. It just doesn't make any sense at all to find Caldera, Inc., Caldera Thin Clients, Inc., and Caldera UK Ltd. related topics redirected and discussed in an article named "SCO Group" under a section "Caldera Systems", which was, as explained, a different company. Apparently, people find that "Caldera" leds to a disambiguation page and when they only find one of the five companies listed there (Caldera Systems), they happily link to Caldera Systems even if they actually meant to link to Caldera originally. Therefore I created a set of redirects and a new entry "Caldera (company)" to serve as a "boilerplate" where the differences can be explained and then branched into the various existing sub-articles and sections elsewhere. Perhaps, at a later stage, this new "Caldera (company)" article could be expanded to discuss the history of all these five companies in context. Perhaps some of the Caldera related contents could be moved from the SCO article to this new article (because it is unrelated to SCO), however, there are also some facts mixed up in the SCO article at present. At the minimum, we need this new entry as kind of a "disambiguation" page between these companies. Of course, I will add references over time. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 19:34, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

I deleted this article, then undeleted it upon reading your explanation. Please keep up the good work attempting to reorganize things to straighten out the confusion. ~Amatulić (talk) 20:51, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

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Checked and fixed the mess created by this bot. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 15:25, 5 August 2018 (UTC)

Proposal to move some material from Caldera OpenLinux and SCO Group articles to here

The organization of the Caldera-related articles has never made sense to me.

1. Much of the backstory and early history of Caldera the company is in the Caldera OpenLinux#Novell Corsair and Caldera OpenLinux#Caldera Network Desktop sections of that article, but really should be here and only summarized in that article. That material more important to why Caldera came into being than it is to the nature of the particular OpenLinux product that eventually came to be. Even in the Caldera OpenLinux#Caldera OpenLinux section of that article, there are parts that are really about corporate strategy and not the OpenLinux product, such as how the acquisition of SCO was aimed at greatly improving Caldera's distribution and marketing channel. That material should be here, not there.
2. The final years of Caldera the company is in the SCO Group#Caldera Systems, Caldera Holdings, Caldera International section of that article, but really should be here and only briefly summarized in that article. To make the article split based on the September 1998 division of Caldera, Inc. into the wholly owned subsidiaries, Caldera Systems and Caldera Thin Clients makes no sense to me. Those kind of corporate business division reorganizations happen all the time, and what Caldera Systems was doing after the reorg didn't change from what Caldera was doing before it – Ransom Love was still in charge and they were still trying to be successful in the Linux business. Nor did it change with the SCO acquisition in 2000 – they were trying to leverage some of what SCO had to be successful in the Linux business. Nor did it change with the name change to Caldera International in 2001. So all the Caldera material should be in the article named Caldera.
3. The split between this article and the SCO Group article should be when Darl McBride replaces Ransom Love as CEO (June 2002) and Caldera changes its name to The SCO Group, in recognition that SCO Unix, not Caldera Linux, is where almost all the revenue is coming from (August 2002). Everything changed after that. McBride immediately focuses on SCO Unix licensing revenue (August 2002); soon creates an internal business group for such revenue (October 2002); hires David Boies to do legal battles (late 2002); announces the SCOsource division to license Linux users (January 2013), and then sues IBM for $1B (March 2003), after which the SCO–Linux wars are in full swing. So the SCO Group article should focus on material that happened after the name change to the SCO Group.

I think this proposal is in accordance with @Matthiaspaul:'s suggestion for future work above. Unless there are any objections to it, I intend to proceed along these lines. Wasted Time R (talk) 23:21, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

While I would applaud if you could add more details, I would probably object to the major restructuring changes you propose because in the past there has been a lot of confusion (in the press, in the communities and also very much so in WP) about the different companies and it was a major endeavour to clean up that mess. I deliberately tried to distinguish between the separate companies in order to make it as transparent as possible which products, people, names, strategies etc. belonged to which company at which point in time and who was actually responsible for what.

In my view, this article is (and should remain) mostly an article about Caldera, Inc., which, after the split into Caldera Systems, Inc. and Caldera Thin Clients, Inc. remained only as a shell for the court case. Of course, this still requires a discussion of the subsidiaries after the split, but only as much as is needed to frame the general picture and lead into separate main articles for the details.

Ideally, we would have independent articles about Caldera Systems and Caldera Thin Clients as well (which, in order to understand the history of Caldera as a whole, really must be seen as independent entities moving in different directions after their inception), but given that we already have articles about the SCO Group and Lineo, it might be a bit too much (at least at this stage) to insert more links in form of separate articles into the two history chains. I tried to find a compromise still discussing the early history of Caldera Systems and Caldera Thin Clients after the split in parallel in the two sub-chapters of chapter 2 before the two companies really moved apart into vastly different directions. Of course, this must be discussed in the two target articles as well, so some redundancy is unavoidable. One thing that is important to understand is that Caldera, Inc. and also Caldera UK and Caldera Thin Clients had nothing at all to do with anything related to SCO (and SCO stuff therefore does not belong into this article), and also that it was the DOS business rather than the Linux business which was profitable. This is part of the reason for the company split in 1998 and also for Caldera Systems' later move towards SCO.

In order to not overload the article, most of the product-related details are discussed in the articles about OpenLinux and OpenDOS/DR-DOS. It was "by design" that these articles also contain enough information about their predecessors as well as some corporate-related information so that they can be read as independent histories seen from the viewpoint of the product rather than the company, so I would object removing these bits from these articles. Nevertheless, some of the very early Caldera history (from Corsair, Expose, and CND times) could be added to the Caldera article as well.

So, if I may propose a plan to move on, if you are truely knowledgable about one of the companies involved and can add more details, please add them as you see fit but if possible without deleting/moving too much from elsewhere or changing the infrastructure as a whole. This might add some more redundancy, but I think we can live with that for a while. If, at some point in the future, we really have enough material about Caldera Systems unrelated to SCO Group stuff, we can think about splitting that out into a separate article. However, I would hate to see the current structure, which was carefully set up this way in order to keep things as much logically separated as possible, while still showing the relations, destroyed.

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 12:42, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for your detailed explanation of the current architecture, and I understand better now what you are going for (and it's never easy representing complex corporate histories). I will withdraw my proposal. However, regarding my point #1, I would suggest adding a {{seealso|Caldera OpenLinux#Novell Corsair|Caldera OpenLinux#Caldera Network Desktop}} at the top of the "Caldera" section in this article. Because otherwise readers are unlikely to find where the most detailed early company narrative is. Regarding my points #2/#3, I believe that there is indeed enough well-sourced, important material to warrant a separate article on Caldera Systems/Caldera International and when I get a chance I will try to put one together. That company existed for four years (August 1998 to August 2002) and was part of some significant industry events and what went on with it is not well-described in any article here (and the place for it is not in the SCO Group article). If I do that, then this article can remained unchanged except for changing the {{main|The SCO Group}} to {{main|Caldera International}}. Wasted Time R (talk) 02:03, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

This sounds good to me. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 19:59, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

I have now done this, see the new Caldera International article which include Caldera Systems as well. There is still some work I plan to do on it (especially giving it a full lede), but the basic structure and contents are there. I have made the minimal changes to this article as indicated above, as well as necessary changes in scope to the SCO Group article. I have also changed a bunch of existing redirects to point to it.

I have not touched the Caldera OpenLinux article. But I have to say that I think it needs a major overhaul. It is full of material that is opinionated, uncited, and/or factually incorrect. A lot of it still dates back to essay-like content that a single editor (who later was indef-blocked and retired) wrote in 2006. Wasted Time R (talk) 00:13, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Great work. :-)

I agree regarding weak areas in the OpenLinux article and over the years tried to tone it down somewhat, also asking for clarification of questionable information and sources. On the other hand, given the historical importance of OpenLinux, I tried not to delete too much stuff solely for being unsourced, always hoping that references could be brought by later on by someone knowledgeable enough about the topic and with a suitable archive of sources. While I don't think a complete overhaul would be needed, please don't hesitate to improve the article and in particular correct errors. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 23:20, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

One dubious thing I see in that article is the idea that Caldera Systems benefited from the $280 million settlement with Microsoft over DR-DOS. The article says, with no cite for the important part: Caldera had won a $280 million[27] lawsuit against Microsoft for DR-DOS and was flush with cash ... Red Hat pulled way ahead of them in terms of US sales and on the global sales front they trailed SUSE and TurboLinux as well, but financially due to the DR-DOS settlement they were the strongest of all the Linux distributions. As far as I can tell, that is not so; Caldera, Inc. and Caldera Systems, Inc. were independent entities. As Ransom Love said in this news story at the time, "Any connection between us is by association only. We're ecstatic only because the suit is over, and now we can have our name. That was part of the agreement we had in place when we (Caldera Inc. and Caldera Systems Inc.) split." That doesn't sound like he was going to see any of the $280 million. I think that Caldera Systems lived on the initial Canopy money combined with the $30 million from the industry investment and the $70 million from the IPO. That was enough to fund the SCO acquisition, which I believe one of these articles (can't locate it right now) also claims was funded with the DR-DOS settlement. However, it's possible I've overlooked something; do you know of any source which says the DR-DOS settlement monies helped fund Caldera Systems? Wasted Time R (talk) 02:59, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

Ransom Love denied it (and some documents I could find seem to support this at least on the surface - but there might be "loopholes"), while other people (including journalists) indeed assumed such a connection. It would be really interesting to know the truth, but this will be difficult to track down reliably due to the involvement of many parties (and their changing roles over time), including the Canopy Group and Novell, the tricky legal details, and also because some of the key players have been found not to have said the truth all the time. Various sources in 1998 and 1999 indicated that the DOS business financed the Linux business. Lyle Ball once also mentioned it in a journal article, however, in this case the context was embedded Linux at Caldera Thin Clients/Lineo only, not Caldera as a whole. Also, this was still before the settlement in 2000 and thus does not include revenues generated from the court case. I guess, either financial documents related to the IPO or surviving internal documents used (and published) as evidence in the various later court cases could help reveal the truth. Did you search Groklaw already?

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:02, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

@Matthiaspaul: I agree that Caldera Systems and Caldera Thin Clients were not startups and that they may have benefited from whatever business Caldera Inc. was doing well in the split, including the DOS business. But that's very different from saying that Caldera Systems benefit from the $280M settlement. And the claim that the original writer here made that "financially due to the DR-DOS settlement they were the strongest of all the Linux distributions" is surely disproved by events; Red Hat was strong enough to weather the .com bust and the early 2000s downturn, whereas Caldera Systems was not. So unless WP:RS can be found that state that the DR-DOS money helped fund Caldera Systems/Caldera International, it has to stay out of these articles, since as a veteran editor here you know that the burden of proof is always on having a source in order to include something, not on having proof of the contrary in order to exclude something. So with all due respect, I object to this edit that you just made. You have added lots of redundant sources with long quotations in the footnotes, which even if you haven't explicitly stated it, will surely give the reader the impression that the DR-DOS settlement was relevant to Caldera Systems/Caldera International. But as far as I know from the sources I've seen it wasn't. That's why I deliberately just cited the settlement in passing with the contemporaneous Wall Street Journal article, rather piling in later stuff from Groklaw. It's fine to have all these footnotes with their long quotes in the Caldera (company) article, but they do not belong in the Caldera International article. Wasted Time R (talk) 22:14, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

I see. Don't worry, I didn't add a statement claiming such a connection (regarding the 2000 settlement, that is), nor did I want to imply one by adding these references - quite to the contrary.

In the initial question of the interview you referred to above, Jenifer Nii suggested something like this, however - like other journalists at the time. That's why I think this is a question which we should deliberately leave open for anyone to draw his own conclusions. We should maintain neutral grounds and just provide the know facts like: "The settlement amount was xyz", "Love claimed there is no connection", "abc suggested a connection", etc.

The reason I added the references was just to correct the incorrect sum of $275m, assuming you just hadn't found a better source. I gave multiple references, because back at the time there was a lot of speculation about the actual sum (from a few dozen million USDs up to a billion). If you think this gives undue weight to this very bit of information, I would suggest we just state the actual sum ($280m) and use only the settlement document as reference. Or alternatively, not state a sum at all using a source indicating that the sum was not disclosed at the time (like the Lea source). (Although, in the second case, it leaves a bit of a bad taste like deliberately suppressing some information which could, at least potentially, be relevant, and sooner or later someone would probably readd the sum, anyway.) What do you think?

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 23:38, 24 November 2019 (UTC)