OpenLinux shop Caldera Inc’s setting out after Microsoft Corp’s small business market by fielding its first very public product in the form of a $4,000 Small Business Server for NetWare device supporting 25-users. Using an AMD or Intel CPU – Caldera’s still evaluating competing tenders – the system will ship in two months with a 56Kb modem, NetWare file and print and full NetWare Directory Service (NDS), Caldera’s own firewall, TCP/IP router IPX Netscape web server – with SuiteSpot to come – email, AppleTalk and connections to other clients including DOS, Windows, OS/2 and Unix. Caldera’s hoping it’s got the tacit approval from Novell Inc to push the unit through its NetWare channels. Caldera figures Novell has effectively abandoned the low-end with its focus on Java-with-everything and the enterprise, even with its remade NetWare for Small Business IntranetWare product and anyway it’s gotten a license from Novell. Caldera says it’s currently talking with at least one consumer electronics hardware vendor about creating a network computer or other thin client device around its embedded DR-DOS operating system and/or WebSypder browser-based interface that is now expected to ship in production versions in three months, once its finished porting Java. It doesn’t think WebSpyder can ever be more than a $20m business. Caldera’s also revved its OpenLinux kernel – its souped-up version of freeware Linux – to version 1.2, which is $40 or $200 with Netscape and StarOffice applications. OpenLinux is essentiaslly a way to recruit third part resale channels – such as Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s – for its other products. Claims that there might be as many as five million Linux users worldwide Caldera says are simply off the wall. It’s shipped 100,000 copies of OpenLinux, it bluntly observes. Caldera, which does half its business in Europe, claims to have shipped 2 million copies of DR-DOS, entirely an OEM business which it’s lately been thinking about spinning off. All DR-DOS development happens at its UK operation in Andover, Hampshire.
